Q&A How I am using AI
I’ve gotten a few questions about how I’ve used AI to help me work. I’m not fancy with AI—I primarily use ChatGPT (free) and Canva (inexpensive).
did a great roundup of AI tools by type of position (marketing, product, legal, finance, etc.) that you should also check out if you want to add to your AI toolkit.How to Start using AI
If you aren’t using AI yet, it’s time to start. With any new trend or technology, it’s essential to try it out to see if there are use cases that can work for you. I know it can feel overwhelming to learn another new thing, but there are likely things you are doing daily that can be made more efficient with AI – saving you time.
To get started using AI, I challenge you to do at least one daily prompt with ChatGPT. It doesn’t have to be work-related. Maybe simplify something at home, such as asking ChatGPT to create a weekly meal plan and grocery list. Doing so lets you learn how to structure your prompts and realize parameters you may want to add, like dietary preferences. You’ll also gain confidence as you do more prompts.
By dipping your toe in, you’ll soon notice how powerful the tool can be, and hopefully, it will help you work better, too.
Another critical step in using AI is discovering how other people use it. With that in mind, here are the main ways I use AI daily. Hopefully, my use of AI will help you see ways to incorporate it into your processes and save time.
Brainstorming
I love to use ChatGPT to help with brainstorming. For instance, when I name some newsletters, I ask ChatGPT to suggest titles. I also used it to help me brainstorm cover options for my book.
I shared my introduction with chatGPT and asked it to suggest some imagery for the cover based on the book. It gave ten ideas in seconds. I then took my favorite ideas and mocked up some options in Canva to see how I liked them conceptually. This made it much easier to fill out my cover brief for my publisher’s designer, knowing that I already had a sense of what I liked and didn’t like and had explored a few options.
When I brainstorm with ChatGPT, sometimes I feel like I am talking to an actual person. It helps me flesh out my thoughts and clarify my main points.
Scheduling
As some of you know, I love Nir Eyal’s Indistractable. In the book, he discusses timeboxing. With timeboxing, you put everything you want to do in your calendar. Instead of making a to-do list, you schedule the items. It works best if you get granular—I even scheduled my shower this morning.
The hard part about Timeboxing is that when you schedule tasks, you must move everything around manually if something comes up. I use a tool called Motion to help with this. I list everything I need to do and estimate how long it will take me and if it can be split into chunks. Motion uses my calendar to build my schedule. It helps solve the problem of having so much to do that I don’t know what to work on next and the issue of when I will get to something. If it’s on the list, I know it will be scheduled.
Content creation
My least favorite part of writing my newsletter is creating social posts to accompany it. I usually ask ChatGPT to suggest social posts based on the content, and I edit those. AI is also great at suggesting types of images to use with a post.
I also love the Canva magic resize tool and background removers to simplify content creation. Back at TMG, when we started with a new partner, we needed multiple sizes of each image, and creating them took up our designers’ time. Now, those types of resizes take seconds.
You do have to be careful with content creation, though.
A few months ago, I spoke with someone who showed me how easy it was to create blog articles. They just asked ChatGPT to write them for them using a barebones prompt. As a soon-to-be-published author, I was appalled. Writing was not central to this person’s work, but I hated that they were likely ripping off other people’s content. Additionally, the blogs read as if they were AI-generated. On an initial read, they were fine, but there was a lot of filler.
Please don’t use AI to write for you freely. Give a focused prompt – tell it to pull from existing content you know the source of. For instance, if you’re applying for jobs, it’s okay to have AI write your cover letter, but give it your CV and the bullet points you want it to hit to get the most out of the tool.
Research
Two of my favorite newsletters,
and ParentData, use AI to make it easy to search their content.As a parent of two small kids, I nearly always have a question I am currently concerned about. On ParentData with AI bot Dewey, you can ask any parenting-related question, and Dewey will answer it and provide the sources from ParentData content. It’s a nifty tool for finding a quick answer.
In Lenny’s newsletter, I use Lenny’s Bot to efficiently find outside sources and opinions from trusted sources. Like Dewey, the reference articles are always linked.
How are you using AI to help your work processes and workflow?
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