Boost Your Productivity with ChatGPT

If you’ve just emerged from 500 days in a Spanish cave, you might not have heard of ChatGPT. For those people, we have a helpful guide on what ChatGPT is and if it’s really going to replace all our jobs here.

For everyone else, you’ve undoubtedly heard of ChatGPT. You can’t get through a week without some new ChatGPT story or prediction. It’s disruptive. Again, not in the ways many try to shock us into believing. But its power to shake things up is real.

We say, why fight it? Instead of fretting over what it will and won’t do to society, find ways to embrace the disruption.

For example, your productivity.

You might not have thought of that one yet. Many articles look at ChatGPT’s higher-end features like software coding, MBA test taking, and nuclear bomb creation (OK, maybe not that one…yet). But they fail to bring it back down to the day-to-day.

At Taskworld, we’re always looking for ways to help our users be more productive. And ChatGPT could be a fantastic resource for many. It’s not only the techies on the bleeding edge of the latest and greatest benefit from ChatGPT. In fact, we’d argue that regular users will benefit most.

So, let’s dive in and look at how you can use ChatGPT to boost your productivity.

Tip 1: Draft Emails

Some of us rattle off emails with ease. For others, what should be a routine task winds up taking up too much valuable time. ChatGPT is a perfect solution for the latter.

ChatGPT almost feels tailor-made for mindless writing tasks, like emails. Try something like, “Please, help me draft an email to my boss letting them know I’ll be at the dentist today.” You’ll have a passable email ready to send within a few seconds. Pro tip: DO NOT JUST COPY IT IN AND SEND IT AS IS. As wonderful as AI prompt writers are, they still make many mistakes. Please give it a quick once over, and then send it out.

Tip 2: Brainstorm Topics & Ideas

Sometimes we need to come up with ideas quickly. People often look up articles like “The 10 Best Ways to Do Something” to help them get started. In these situations, it’s great to turn to ChatGPT for help. It’s also excellent for times when you need to do something outside your normal comfort zone or wheelhouse. Say you’re in software development and never usually speak with customers. But someone from customer support needs you to create a customer response. ChatGPT is perfect for helping you get started. We’re not advocating that anyone turns their brain off and trusts AI completely. What we’re suggesting here is to use it to start things off and then apply your own creative juices to “top off” ChatGPT’s suggestions.

Tip 3: Summarize or Digest Long Documents

10,000-word draft asking for your attention? Ain’t nobody got time for that. ChatGPT is a modern-day Cliff’s Notes, except it can summarize within seconds. Think of it as a working, active TL;DR that you can ask follow-up questions. The Opera browser has even announced built-in AI tools that will perform this for you in the browser! Remember, ChatGPT is a chatbot, meaning you can “converse” with it. So, after the summary comes in, ask it a few follow questions to ensure you really understood the article and didn’t miss any key points.

Tip 4: Explain Complex Topics to You

Like the above tip, you can use ChatGPT to break complex subjects down. It can come up with clever metaphors and helpful explanations you wouldn’t think an AI chatbot could manage. If the first answer is too complex, you can ask ChatGPT to simplify the solution even more or prompt it to “explain it as if I’m 12.”

Tip 5: Create Lists

Lists are a great way to organize yourself on a task before getting started. These can be as simple as a shopping list or tasks you need to complete for a project. Listing out all the steps you need to take to ensure beforehand is a great way to ensure you don’t overlook a necessary task. But sometimes, creating a list of what to do requires extensive research and planning. To help you save time, ask ChatGPT to write the list for you. It might miss a detail or two, but chances are, it’ll help you remember something you might’ve forgotten if doing it on your own.

Tip 6: Create a Study Guide

There are several reasons you might need to study something new. Maybe you’ve been asked to take on a new role at work or discovered something new you want to add to your skill base. Ideally, we should all be learning new things as much as we can. But often, we need or want to learn something new at a less-than-ideal time when we’re already busy with work and life. ChatGPT can help you streamline your studies. Ask it to break down the new subject for you; if that’s not enough, ask for the steps one should take to learn this new task. You can end up with a pretty thorough study guide created in minutes.

Tip 7: Ask it for Tips & Motivation

Lastly, you can always ask ChatGPT directly for specific tips and motivation. Since it’s pulling its information from a web crawl, most of the suggestions will be commonly known. Still, these tips can be helpful reminders at times. Similarly, you can reach out to ChatGPT for an inspirational pep talk before a big interview or important meeting. ChatGPT will offer motivational tips and quotes to help you face your day.

A Note About Using ChatGTP

Used correctly, ChatGPT can be a helpful tool that helps you speed up your work…so that you can be more productive and do a better job.

This last point is vital.

You should never try to replace your own work with ChatGPT. For example, suppose you’re writing articles completely with ChatGPT. In that case, that’s basically plagiarism - since the program cannot create new ideas but snags snippets from what others have already written.

When you use programs like ChatGPT, use them to elevate your work. If you speed up your outline creation, you now have more time to be creative and do unique research for the article's meat. Since ChatGPT has done this part of your work, you can use that free time to push your work to greater levels. In that way, ChatGPT is not a work replacement but an enhancement.

Wrapping Up

There's no denying that ChatGPT is a game-changer. But we still think that it's not necessarily in the ways that many are predicting.

It should help supplement your work and not replace your unique voice and insights.

Instead of fearing it or over-relying on it, simply think of it as another tool in your arsenal to help your productivity. You have email for communication, ChatGPT to help jumpstart some of your work, and Taskworld to help you plan your day. With the right tools, you're ready to take your productivity to the next level!

If you're not already boosting your productivity with Taskworld, give it a try today!