“Hey ChatGPT, I’m tired today—can you write my weekly newsletter?”

I’m kidding. I wouldn’t do that to you.

(Not yet. 😉)

Have you spent much time with ChatGPT recently? Or ever?

Several friends have been nudging me for a while now to spend more time exploring what ChatGPT can do for me. I had been pretty skeptical of AI technologies, but after informing myself better and learning how to use them, I’m impressed.

Here are some things I used ChatGPT for in the past week:

Extracted email addresses from a screenshot in a way that they were easy to copy and paste. ChatGPT even removed duplicates without me asking it to. With simple tasks like this, ChatGPT can save you quite a bit of time.

Refined my business plan for the remainder of the year. For it to be a useful coach or sparring partner, you have to tell ChatGPT about yourself and you have to go back and forth a few times. But once you do that, ChatGPT can be so helpful for clarifying your thoughts. It also has a new “memory” feature now where it remembers things about you—and it will use those memories to give you better answers in the future.

Translated text into Indonesian. ChatGPT is much better at translating than Google Translate. It sounds way more natural.

Made a workshop preparation checklist. This was really handy, because otherwise I’d forgotten a couple of steps, like pointing people to my website and YouTube videos at the end of the workshop! I also told ChatGPT how my workshop went and what I’d like to improve next time—and I told it to remind me of these improvements points next time we’re preparing for a workshop. It said it will remind me. Very cool.

Got medical advice on how a friend should deal with a painful horsefly bite. No big deal, as it turns out.

Developed YouTube video outlines. It’s not that I asked ChatGPT to write video outlines for me. But I told it what I wanted to share and ChatGPT helped me turn that into a more engaging and compelling narrative. The videos I recorded flow better, I think, than they otherwise would have.

Summarized course feedback. When you take one of my productivity courses, at the end I’ll ask you for feedback. I asked ChatGPT to summarize what people say about my courses—take a look:

(If you haven’t already, maybe it’s time for you to enroll, too? 😉)

The gist of it is that you can do a lot with ChatGPT. It’s not that you couldn’t do these things in any other way, but you often can do them faster with this new tool. Of course, like with any tool, you have to know what it’s useful for. For example, I’ve been using ChatGPT to try to come up with a name for a future course that I’m working on, and its suggestions are all very generic.

AIs like ChatGPT are very hyped right now. I’m not the kind of person who enjoys getting caught up in a hype—if anything, I’m usually too skeptical of things other people are very excited about. I remember when I was 12 years old and everyone was reading the Harry Potter books. The more excitedly they spoke about this story about wizards and wands, the more I resisted picking up Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone.

Eventually, I gave in and… boy, had I been wrong.

So despite my natural skepticism of hype, I try not to be a Luddite. ChatGPT-like technology really does seem transformative. And it’s improving at an almost alarming rate.

Apple is apparently planning to incorporate AI features into a lot of its apps too, including Apple Notes… I’m excited to see what they’re cooking up.

Anyway, here’s my suggestion for you. Take your biggest challenge at work. Tell ChatGPT about it. Also tell it who you are, what your responsibilities at work are, and so on. Ask how it can help you. Ask what other information it needs to help you. Then give it that information. And see what happens.

Let me know how it goes.

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