3 Ways to Get your hours back with ChatGPT
From predictive analytics to generative AI, every industrial niche seems to be seeing a new AI driven tool that claims to boost productivity. And yet, the buzz doesn’t seem to lead to adoption by the workers in the front lines. Perhaps it’s due to a lack of time or motivation to experiment with an AI solution or a perceived lack of usefulness of the technology. For me, it was all of those but as my job started to require me to deliver more in less time, I took a leap of faith to test the AI celebrity. Today, I must admit that weaving Chat GPT into my daily work has been a true game changer that got me hours back each day. Today, in the hopes of helping others still standing at the shoreline, hesitant to jump in, I’m going to share my personal journey of working with this AI sidekick.
Getting to Know the GPT (Great Productivity Tool)
Before we sail further, it’s crucial to know what ChatGPT is good at and where it fumbles. After all, you wouldn’t want to use a hammer to paint your wall and then complain about the damage afterwards. ChatGPT is inherently a text-based tool that can take in written commands or requests and return an answer, again, in written format. It can organize the content into a table format but drawing graphs, creating power point slides, or analyzing a bulk data set from your client are out of its reach. However, there are plenty of other tasks that it can nail down effectively, including being a coach that can teach you how to complete the aforementioned tasks using other programs.
With that in mind, let me share how I personally used ChatGPT and experienced the most amount of success.
1.
The talking library for all things written
I’m not a fast reader so digesting documents or long articles is a painful process. histories of organizations with timelines, rosters of names, market trend reports, new best practices, changes in CMS regulations and policies are some examples of documents that had found their ways onto my to-do list and sat there as I juggled other competing priorities like client meetings or creating Excel templates. Several times, I wished I could have somebody just read all of the materials and give me a quick summary with the important bits relevant to the context of my work.
Enter ChatGPT for the rescue.
In my opinion, this is what ChatGPT does best; textual alchemy. Open up a new chat and name it to whatever content you’re trying to read. Then tell it that you will be uploading content that you want ChatGPT to refer to whenever asked a question about them. Depending on the length of the document, you might have to copy parts of it and upload them separately. I personally like to carve out sections or chapters and tell ChatGPT a section name (e.g. “This is the section about the new regulations for billing patients in clinics”) which makes referring back to the specific content easier down the road. Once this step is complete, you now have a personal assistant with subject matter expertise in that very document or content you uploaded with full capability of summarizing, paraphrasing, editing, and reformatting the content. This capability makes ChatGPT equally powerful in generating content as well. Requests to draft materials such as emails or executive summaries, proofreading, editing, and even rewriting an already completed document to adjust for tone, professionalism, or length have all been conducted flawlessly, and under 5 seconds.
One word of caution is to make sure that you are not uploading sensitive information to ChatGPT and that you’re abiding to all of the rules and regulations set by your organization. While OpenAI says they have a strict set of rules around data gathering, retention, and usage, there are several companies that have banned or limited the use of ChatGPT due to security concerns. Please use your best professional judgement when using ChatGPT or any other AI tool.
2.
The new Google, but easier
“Give me general information of surgical operations in academic healthcare organizations in the United States.”
Have you ever joked with your friends about how you have no idea what you would’ve done in college if you didn’t have Google? I’m developing similar sentiments for ChatGPT. One of the challenges commonly shared with my colleagues is how you have to quickly learn a new topic or even a new company or industry only weeks or even days before going into a meeting.
Enter ChatGPT for the rescue. Again.
As you may already know, ChatGPT can regurgitate information that it has scrapped from the entire internet, like a search engine. What makes it extra easy for learning purposes is that you can be much more relaxed with your search strategy. You can start with generic high level questions and drill into specific details flexibly as they come to your mind. For instance, let’s say you wanted to learn about assessing a surgical department in an academic healthcare organization. You could start by asking the following as if you were interacting with a human subject matter expert.
This probably won’t arm you with the most detailed or applicable information about the industry but the beauty of using ChatGPT is that you could immediately follow up with questions on a very specific sub-topic and receive answers within the context of your project. If all of the questions are asked in the same chat, you can also go back to previously discussed topics as ChatGPT will keep track of the full context of the conversation. So for instance, you could follow up from the previous question to learn more about surgical residency programs in academic healthcare organizations, then switch to the reimbursement guidelines for surgical procedures without losing any of the previous discussion.
Combine this tip with setting up custom instructions for ChatGPT and now you have an assistant that is truly tailored to your needs. When you click your ID in the bottom left corner, you will be able to find the option to set custom instructions for ChatGPT. Here you can specify what you would like it to know about you and how to generate responses. In my case, I specified my occupation (consultant), the context of my work (healthcare consulting), and the field that I usually would search for (healthcare industry trends, programming languages, process improvement principles, etc.). I also set it to generate any written drafts in a professional and concise style that appropriate for a professional audience, which could save you even extra time.
3.
Apprentice for simple tasks
Since it was first introduced, ChatGPT has evolved into a whole new beast. What was once an advanced chat bot can now digest, edit and create documents following your commands. In any line of work, there always lies a pile of mundane and manual work that is necessary but really not sexy enough for you to stay concentrated.
Recently, I had to review a list of companies and find several pieces of detail for each of them. As you might imagine, it really is not a difficult task as all I needed to do is 1. search the company on google and 2. document the findings on a summary sheet. But if the end of that list is nowhere in sight even when the count exceeded over several hundreds, the sheer volume of the task makes it challenging and even worse, time consuming.
If you have a tech savvy person with some programming skillset, you could make a crawler that could complete this for you (or you could ask ChatGPT to write a code for that too). But for me, that was a path too cumbersome to take. Instead, I copied and pasted the company names into an Excel sheet, saved it, then dropped it into the chat box in ChatGPT. Then I requested it to
- Find where the company head quarters is by searching Google Maps.
- Add a 1 sentence summary of what services or products are offered.
- Find the average yearly revenue if reported.
- Format the Excel sheet with table borders.
- Make that Excel sheet downloadable.
In a few minutes, I had a file that I could download and start doing actual work instead of copying and pasting things from the internet. Now, I must say that ChatGPT isn’t perfect and some information did come back as incorrect or incomplete so some human review is still a necessity. However, that doesn’t negate the fact that it saved me literally HOURS of manual labor and boosted my productivity by several fold.
We just looked at 3 different ways you can use ChatGPT yourself to earn hours back in your day. ChatGPT, like any other AI solution, is not magic and is definitely not perfect. However, if used well with some creativity, it will open up new possibilities for you to spend your time where it’s most meaningful. I hope you found this post to be helpful and if you would like similar content to be shared, please let me know in the comments!
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