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03 Feb

How ChatGPT Tasks can do the job for you


Datum: 2025-02-03 08:18
A humanoid robot wearing a red jacket works at a desk in a lively open office environment.

Imag­ine hav­ing an AI work­ing in the back­ground for you, deliv­er­ing valu­able out­puts exact­ly when you need them — again and again. Now, it’s pos­si­ble, though still in a some­what lim­it­ed capacity.


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


Like hav­ing Chat­G­PT at your back

A few days ago, Ope­nAI intro­duced a new fea­ture in Chat­G­PT called Tasks” (cur­rent­ly only avail­able in the paid ver­sions of Chat­G­PT — not in the free ver­sion). With this fea­ture, you can ask the AI to per­form a task at a spe­cif­ic time in the future or on a recur­ring sched­ule, for exam­ple, every Tues­day at 3:00 PM.

It can search the inter­net, gen­er­ate text using its lan­guage mod­el, and cre­ate images with DALL‑E, but you can’t upload a doc­u­ment for the AI to process or use as data. Cre­at­ing a task is sim­ple — type as if you were writ­ing to a col­league, using plain and nat­ur­al sentences.

What’s the point?

One might won­der what the val­ue of this is. That’s what I asked myself, and I’ve already used Chat­G­PT Tasks for:

  • Pre­sen­ta­tions on clients’ busi­ness­es before per­son­al pro­duc­tiv­i­ty coach­ing ses­sions: When I take on a new pro­duc­tiv­i­ty coach­ing client, I must famil­iar­ize myself with their com­pa­ny. I ask Chat­G­PT to pre­pare a short pre­sen­ta­tion and send it to me at a con­ve­nient time before the ses­sion. The infor­ma­tion I need is deliv­ered on a sil­ver plat­ter when I need it.
  • Reminders of my goals and steps to achieve them: Every morn­ing at 8:00 AM, Chat­G­PT reminds me of my cur­rent goals and sug­gests one con­crete 30-minute activ­i­ty per goal that I can do that day to work toward them.
  • Sug­ges­tions for week­end lunch recipes: On Wednes­day after­noons, Chat­G­PT sends me five dif­fer­ent lunch recipe ideas for the week­end based on the cuisines we like and our per­son­al preferences.

Can you think of some­thing you could use this fea­ture for?

If so, give it a try!

Do this

If you’re using one of the paid ver­sions of ChatGPT:

  1. Start a new chat and change the mod­el to GPT4 with Sched­uled Tasks.”
  2. In the usu­al prompt box, type your request to Chat­G­PT, includ­ing what you want it to do and when you want it done. For exam­ple: On Thurs­day, Jan­u­ary 30, 2025, at 1:00 PM (but not right now), give me a short pre­sen­ta­tion about the Swedish com­pa­ny NN. I’d like to know a lit­tle about the company’s his­to­ry, where they oper­ate, what they do, and approx­i­mate­ly how many employ­ees they have. Use bul­let points.”
  3. Chat­G­PT will cre­ate the sched­uled task. Some­times, it might exe­cute the com­mand imme­di­ate­ly (annoy­ing­ly!), but in such cas­es, you can respond with some­thing like: No, I don’t want you to do this now, but when I asked you to.” It will apol­o­gize and cre­ate the task as requested.
  4. To view your sched­uled tasks, click on your avatar at the top-right cor­ner when using Chat­G­PT on the web or in the desk­top app and select Tasks” from the menu that appears. Here, you can adjust the prompt, pause exe­cu­tion, or delete a task entirely.
  5. When the task runs, note whether it did what you want­ed. If it didn’t ful­ly meet your expec­ta­tions, adjust the prompt for next time and test again!

Get things done with­out doing them

Using Chat­G­PT Tasks, you can avoid per­form­ing cer­tain tasks your­self. The fea­ture has lim­it­ed capa­bil­i­ties for now, but this is like­ly just the begin­ning. Grad­u­al­ly — and per­haps faster than we expect — Chat­G­PT will become more capa­ble, allow­ing us to save sig­nif­i­cant­ly more time and effort.

So, learn to cre­ate sched­uled tasks now, and you’ll be ready to ful­ly uti­lize more advanced fea­tures when they arrive.

What about you?

What have you used Chat­G­PT Tasks for? Let me know! I’m eager to find more ways to get more done with less effort, so I’d love to hear your tips. 

(Look­ing for more AI hacks? Check out Learn how to get the AI to write your ALT texts”!)


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