The blog

For you who prefer listening to reading, this post is also available as an episode of the ""Done!"" podcast:

Let Go of the Small Stuff

Instead, it’s the small moments of the job day — those things I want to get done with­out putting my soul into them — that AI helps me most with so far. A few examples:

• I got a screen­shot of a hand­ful of names in a ver­ti­cal list that I had to write in a row in an invoice. Since it was a pic­ture, I could­n’t ​“select”, ​“copy” and ​“paste”. I also did­n’t want to spend time writ­ing the names man­u­al­ly. I uploaded the screen­shot to Chat­G­PT and wrote, ​“Can you pick out first and last names from this table and write them on a row with a com­ma between each name pair?” as the prompt. The AI did it!
   
• I want­ed to show a sup­pli­er what per­cent­age dis­tri­b­u­tion I had between dif­fer­ent sources of incom­ing traf­fic to my web­site. I had a table in Google Ana­lyt­ics with the actu­al traf­fic vol­ume, but I did­n’t want to show that. It would also be nice to avoid cre­at­ing a pie chart myself. I took a screen­shot of the table and asked Chat­G­PT, ​“Can you make a pie chart of the dis­tri­b­u­tion between the dif­fer­ent stan­dard chan­nel groups regard­ing num­ber of ses­sions?” Voila, I got a suf­fi­cient­ly neat pie chart as an image to down­load.
   
• When I post pic­tures on my blog, in my week­ly newslet­ter, on LinkedIn and else­where, I have to enter an ALT text that describes what is in the pic­ture — often in both Eng­lish and Swedish. I find this cum­ber­some and tedious. I test­ed again to upload a pic­ture to Chat­G­PT and wrote, ​“Describe what’s in the pic­ture in one sin­gle sen­tence, please. Trans­late the sen­tence into Swedish after­ward. You don’t have to write ​‘The pic­ture shows’ at the begin­ning of the sen­tence.” as the prompt. Then, I was amazed at how pre­cise­ly (and con­cise­ly) the AI for­mu­lat­ed the text I did­n’t have to write myself.

As you under­stand, these oper­a­tions are not the core of my job, but they are small things that take effort and time. The more I (and you, of course) can AI-auto­mate them, the more time there will be for tasks where the glow lies.

Most Time-Sav­ing Right Now

The point of this newslet­ter is to give you tips on tricks and tools that give you more time for what mat­ters. Right now, AI is the bright­est star there. There­fore, ask the AI first.

Do this

When you have to do some­thing oth­er than what you like most in your job, ask your­self: ​“Can an AI do this?”.

Turn to the AI ser­vice you have fall­en for. It could be Microsoft­’s Bing, Google’s Gem­i­ni or Ope­nAI’s Chat­G­PT, like me.

Try to do what you sus­pect the AI could do.

(Be care­ful with infor­ma­tion secu­ri­ty. Fol­low any AI poli­cies your employ­er has. Do not release sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion. Turn off chat his­to­ry to be on the safe side.)

More ener­gy for the essen­tial tasks

If you ask the AI first, you will soon­er than oth­er­wise become aware of what it can do for you. You avoid tasks that do not enrich you but still have to be done by some­one. You get more time and ener­gy for what you like to do most.

How about you?

What do you use AI for most right now? Please write and tell me about it!

(It’s pret­ty great when you craft the per­fect prompt and the AI chat deliv­ers exact­ly what you were look­ing for. Reme­ber to save your best AI prompts for the future!)