My Top-10 Uses for ChatGPT

It’s been about a year of using ChatGPT as a daily tool in my arsenal. Thankfully the hysteria around it has faded a bit. Don’t get me wrong, the AI robots still may take our jobs and end life on this planet as we know it — but probably not before Spring.

I’ve hopped on tons of the hype trains trying out all kinds of different tactics, but a year in, what I’ve settled on are a few basic things that ChatGPT comes in clutch for… I thought you might get some benefit from that list, so here it is (in no particular order):

1. Explain this to me like I’m a child. Those complex topics that I would write off as being “over my head” much more accessible with a simple prompt asking to explain them like you’re a child. I feel like a child every time I ask — but no one can see and I learn something new! Once I have that basic understanding, it’s much easier to play catch up to have an adult conversation on the topic.
2. Re-organize/Re-format. You still have to be careful it doesn’t hallucinate or omit information, but it’s a huge time-saver to have ChatGPT do boring, monotonous tasks like extracting fist names from a list, wrapping something in HTML tags, taking paragraphs of information and displaying it in tables, or oganizing your grocery list by department.
3. Comments for my code. I’ve been pretty terrible at adding comments in my code. To be fair, most of it so basic it needs no explanation — but I’ve also just been lazy. While I’ve have mixed-results on having it write code for me, it does an awesome job of documentation.
4. Outlines. I’ve yet to find AI content I enjoy reading, so I tend to avoid publishing its copywriting (though there are exceptions)… But its been a huge help in getting my wheels spinning. When I have a topic idea, I’ll often ask ChatGPT to write an outline for an article on that topic. It always helps me consider a thing or two that I might have omitted.
5. Summaries. Who doesn’t love a good ‘tl;dr’? I’m sure I could get better at summarizing article, but ChatGPT does a pretty bang-up job already — so I’m taking the shortcut. I’ve added “Key Takeaway” sections to some of my more active blogs. As a user, I really enjoy the user experience when I just want to make sure I’m on the right article.
6. Thesaurus (on steroids). Nerdy to admit it, but Thesaurus.com has been one of my favorite websites (not that I use fancy words, I just sometimes can’t think of the most basic ones 😂). But unlike a thesaurus, ChatGPT can suggest different ways to say entire sentences or phrases.
7. Brainstorming. You know when you just need to throw out a bunch of ideas and see what sticks? I’ll often ask ChatGPT to give me 10 X ideas, or 100 suggestions for Y. I’m usually not even through its list before a suggestion sends me down a path that would have taken me hours (or weeks, or months) to come up with staring at the ceiling.
8. Critiques. Did you know you can upload a screenshot of a website to ChatGPT and ask it to critique the design, layout and copy? Is it perfect? No… But it usually gives me a thing or two to consider that I wasn’t seeing from my perspective. This, to me, is huge when you mostly work alone.
9. Airtable/Notion formulas. While I’ve seen it get some pretty basic math wrong, it’s helped me write formulas for my databases that I would have never come up with on my own. I was always pretty terrible at these, so maybe this impresses me more because it’s not something I’m good at.
10. Having fun with the kids. There’s no doubt AI will have a bigger impact on my kid’s lives than it will mine, so I’ve introduced it to all 3 of them. They all enjoy asking it to tell insane stories or make pictures out of the wildest thoughts in their imagination (I’m probably on some ‘watch list’ now 😅).