Turn ChatGPT Into Your Assistant: A Step-By-Step Guide
ChatGPT is arguably the most powerful productivity tool on the planet - but most people are using it wrong.
If you know how to leverage this AI chatbot, it can be as impactful as a strategic advisor or as helpful as a virtual assistant with every day tasks.
When you are using ChatGPT, there's two things to keep in mind:
- effective prompt engineering
- practicing responsible usage
Prompt Engineering
The way to get ChatGPT to give you the best outputs is by diving into prompt engineering. Just knowing the basics can make a world of a difference.
For example, if you say
"hey chatgpt, write me a 150 word blog post about climate change" it will give you something very generic.
But if you say this instead:
"Act as a climate change expert. Write a comprehensive 250-word blog post that sheds light on the urgent issue of climate change. Please cover the causes, consequences, and potential solutions to this global crisis. Explain how human activities, such as the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation, have accelerated climate change. Discuss the devastating impacts on the environment, including rising temperatures, extreme weather events, and the loss of biodiversity. Emphasize the importance of global cooperation and individual action in mitigating climate change, including the transition to renewable energy sources, sustainable agriculture, and reducing carbon emissions. Additionally, touch upon the role of policy changes and international agreements like the Paris Agreement. Ensure that the blog post is concise, engaging, and provides readers with a clear understanding of the gravity of the situation and the steps we can take to combat climate change."
The second prompt will provide an expert-level output.
That's why you'll hear AI Enthusiasts chanting "garbage in = garbage out" in the depths of Reddit forums.
If your prompts are not good enough, the response will be generic and robotic.
Practicing Responsible Usage
Before using ChatGPT or any AI tool, please read this section.
AI tools are extremely powerful and huge productivity boosters but it's important to be aware of some risks associated with them:
- Data and privacy concerns: never input confidential information, IP, or other people's contact information such as email lists
- Be aware that GPT models are trained on datasets, and this could lead to a bias in information. Always do your own research.
- Never copy & paste ai-generated content, instead humanize it, edit it, add your own human experiences, stories, insights, etc.
- If you use it for research be aware that some facts, stats, or calculations could be incorrect. These are called AI Hallucinations. Instead, you can use tools like perplexity.ai which is an ai-powered search engine that cites it's sources.
- Be compassionate towards others in these times of change. Change doesn't come easy for everyone. We are experiencing one of the most profound shifts of humanity.
- WEF reports we will witness 85M jobs become obsolete, while giving rise to 97M ai-related jobs in the same time frame. This is why it's important to learn AI skills, so you can stay ahead of the shift and also help shape how humanity integrates this technology into our lives.
Alright enough with all the basics, let's jump into the topic that you're actually here for - how to turn ChatGPT into your assistant.
This is a huge productivity hack for you (and your team).
How To Turn ChatGPT Into Your Assistant:
The first step, is to do a "brain dump" of all of the things you have on your 'to-do list' and have ChatGPT help you sort it out.
This is what ChatGPT suggests you tackle first:
In the same response, it confirms that it understands the assignment...
and now here's my suggested schedule for the entire week:
Schedule for the week. Done.
Next, I want to know how can ChatGPT actually help me accomplish these tasks at hand.
Wow.
Pretty cool, right?
After you have your tasks sorted, you'll want to ask ChatGPT to create briefs for each task to keep you (your team) and ChatGPT on task.
Almost done.
The final step is to schedule it.
If it's not on the calendar, then it's basically just a wishful list of activities.
There's two ways to schedule your tasks.
First Method: You Do It Manually.
Go to your google calendar (or whichever tool you use) and add the tasks into your calendar including the brief in the description.
Second method: You Ask AI.
Alternatively, you can use this free ChatGPT4 plugin called MixerBoxCalendar.
After enabling MixerBox you'll have to login and authorize calendar access - simply follow the steps it prompts you with.
Then, you can write the prompt asking it to add the task on your calendar (and don't forget to include the brief in the prompt).
That's it.
You're done.
From Unorganized To-Do List → Assigned & In Queue
Personally, I like using the MixerBox calendar plugin because I can continue talking to ChatGPT without breaking productivity and toggling in between tabs.
Note: You can schedule meetings too, but just be careful because it'll prompt you for the email addresses of the attendees and that could present an issue down the road with how the contact information is being handled.
If you do use it to schedule meetings, just be generic and tell it to block off the time including the meeting name and description and then later go to your google calendar and manually invite your contacts into the calendar placeholder.
In conclusion, this is how you turn ChatGPT into your daily assistant.
- Create your to-do list, prioritizing the high impact items first
- Sort out the tasks and delegate if applicable
- Create briefs per task
- Schedule it on your calendar
If you get in a habit of doing this with all of your tasks, you'll discover new ways of integrating ChatGPT (and other AI tools) into your life.
More importantly, you are now in the productivity fast track getting things done at record speed.
If you found this helpful, let me know in the comments so I know whether or not I should do more of these deep dives more often.
Want the copy & paste prompts? Comment below for the google doc link.
Thank you so much for reading this article.
P.P.S.: If you are looking for someone to upskill your marketing team and teach them how to use AI responsibly and effectively: email me [email protected] to see if an AI corporate workshop is a good fit for your organization!
