3 ChatGPT productivity hacks you’re missing 👀

Hey AI Puppies, 

Right about now is when those New Year's Resolutions start to fall by the wayside 😅

But instead of getting bogged down by unfulfilled goals, we have a better idea: strengthening your productivity with – you guessed it – the power of AI! 

We’ve explored AI tactics big and small for streamlining work, but today, we’re going to focus on three simple, easy-to-learn hacks you can implement today with your go-to chatbot 💪

That’s right – everything in today’s newsletter can be done in ChatGPT! 

Keep reading to learn easy AI methods for:

🐾Sending snappy, well-composed emails with excellent grammar

🐾Understanding and implementing feedback

🐾Preparing for your next meeting with ease

Let’s get into it!

Level-Up Your Email Game

Few professionals can get through their day without sending a few emails. And if email writing doesn’t come to you naturally, it might be a serious source of stress 🙃

Whether you’re emailing clients or just communicating internally, AI can help here on two fronts:

1. Writing emails from scratch

2. Editing emails you’ve already written

For #1, the key here is your prompt. When you take to ChatGPT (or Claude, or whatever you prefer), be sure to include the following ingredients in your prompt:

👉 Your role

👉 Your audience

👉 The goal of your email

👉 The tone you’re going for

👉 Important dates/deadlines 

Let’s say you’re writing an email to your team with a friendly reminder to accurately track time (an email no one wants to send or receive 😣). 

A prompt that includes all of the above would look like this:

I’m a project manager. I need to remind my direct reports to be better about time tracking, because accounting has had problems with invoicing due to incomplete and late timesheets. I’ve had to send out three emails like this already, so this needs to be a firm email. Can you write a short but persuasive email reminding everyone to be better on this week’s timesheet, which is due by end of day.

Here’s what ChatGPT gave us:

That should do the trick 🤝

Let’s say you prefer to write your own emails, but need an extra set of eyes. 

For #2, your prompt can be a bit simpler. Just let ChatGPT know you’re sharing an email and what you want fixed. For example:

I'm going to copy and paste an email I'm sending to my team. Can you please shorten it, fix grammatical and spelling errors, and make it as easy to read as possible?

Here’s the “before” email we shared (no need to read it – it’s purposely pretty rough):

Versus what we got back from ChatGPT:

Much better!

With stronger emails, stronger outputs are sure to follow 👏

Implement Feedback

Receiving and understanding feedback can make or break your performance. Do you ever waste time getting stuck staring at feedback?

No worries – your AI friend over at ChatGPT is excellent at analyzing feedback. 

This hack will look different depending on your role, but the basic prompt structure is the same for everyone:

1. Tell ChatGPT the gist of your assignment or project and that you will copy and paste your work below. 

2. Tell ChatGPT you have received feedback from your client/manager/coworkers and that you will also copy and paste that feedback below. 

3. Ask ChatGPT to send back a version that integrates the feedback. 

Let’s say you’re a recruiter, and a colleague wants to adjust a job posting you’ve created. 

In this scenario, the ChatGPT prompt might look something like:

“I am a recruiter. I am writing a job posting for an open role at our company. I am going to copy and paste my first draft below. Under my draft, I am also going to copy and paste the feedback I received from a colleague. Can you please send back a version of the job posting that properly integrates this feedback?”

Here’s what this prompt gave us, as well as the format of our prompt (full disclosure, we used a real Dog Trainer job posting from Petco for this 🐶):

We’ll spare you the painfully long version we copied in, but at the bottom, we then added this:

Here’s what we got back:

Voila! Much, much clearer 👐

Use this hack every time you get tricky feedback, and you’ll love the time-saving results. 

Pro-tip: if you’re dealing with a lot of feedback for a lengthy project, break it down section by section when working with ChatGPT. Prompts like “okay, let’s zero in on feedback for page 1 of the report” will do the trick 👏

Feel Confident in Every Meeting

Even if you’ve been in your role for years, we all have to deal with less-than-pleasant meetings – especially if you don’t get briefs from an assistant or teammates beforehand. 

To shake off those pre-meeting jitters, head to ChatGPT for some confidence-inducing notes!

Every meeting will have its own needs, but here are just a few ways ChatGPT can help you prepare:

🤝Turning rambling notes into organized talking points

🤝Fleshing out the agenda with important notes

🤝Advice for handling specific types of meetings

Let’s break down each of these with an example prompt! As always, the more detail you add about your role, company, and goals will help generate the best results possible ✍️

#1: Turning rambling notes into organized talking points

If you have a ton of thoughts swimming around your brain, ChatGPT can help you simplify them for your audience. 

Try this prompt:

“I’m heading into a quarterly planning session meeting. It’s a really important call. I have a lot of notes and ideas I want to bring up, but they’re unorganized and confusing. Can you please take everything I’m copying from my notes below, and turn them into an organized list of talking points I can refer to during my meeting?”

We handed over a list of messy notes from a theoretical dog academy owner, and got this back from ChatGPT:

#1: Fleshing out the agenda with important notes

Now, let’s say the meeting has a pre-set agenda, and you want to make the most of it! For a scenario like this, try a prompt like:

“Here’s the agenda for a call I have coming up. I am a mid-level associate and I want to stand out to my manager during the call. Can you please include 5 talking points under each action item that I should consider before the call?”

We copied in a generic meeting agenda and got this advice:

#1: Advice for handling specific types of meetings

Finally, let’s say you’re heading into a call you’re unsure how to handle. Or, even if you’re used to this type of call, you need this one to go a particular way. 

Try a prompt like this:

“I’m heading into a call with my mentor, and I need to tell her that an account I’m on is going poorly and I would like to be removed from it. How can I bring this up to her in a way that’s professional and respectful? Please outline 5 talking points to help me.”

In this example, ChatGPT even shared a recommended script to follow:

For all of these, the goal is to replace rumination and time-sucking anxiety with confidence!

Your Next Assignment

This week’s assignment is pretty easy: test out any of these hacks (email writing, feedback analysis, meeting prep) within ChatGPT or Claude.

Don’t think you need the help? You know what they say: with AI, even old dogs can learn new tricks! Well, that’s what we’re saying at least 😉

Oh, and don’t forget to follow our latest AI tips and creations on socials – we’re live on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and TikTok 📲

Happy Friday, puppies! We’ll be back next week with more 🐾👋🐾

Cheers,

The AI Puppy