How I 1x, 10x, and 100x my productivity using ChatGPT

 How I 1x, 10x, and 100x my productivity using ChatGPT

🧠 A few years ago, I created a mindmap based on 100 or so newsletters / podcasts from the genius David Stiernholm. It was a manual process: listen, take notes, and summarize on a mindmap. Many hours of well-invested time.

🤖 Now, I wanted to see if I could partner up with ChatGPT and set up a semi-automatic workflow from newsletter to mindmap. NOTE: I'm not a programmer; I cannot write any Python code myself.

🎉 Yes, we managed to pull it off as a team, see the workflow at the end of the post.

💡 What about the promised productivity gain?
1x: Generating the mind map manually took about 8-10 hours, which is approximately how long it took to develop and execute the workflow below.
10x: Without the help of ChatGPT, I estimate that the workflow work would take 80 hours. Starting with reading guides on how to install Python, learning to use APIs, and so on.
100x: Manually generating a mindmap for 100 new episodes (there are >600 in David's archive) would take 6-8 hours. Running the workflow below takes 5-10 minutes, depending on OpenAI usage, making the time from e-mail to mindmap 100x faster.

🔍 Four perspectives:
📌 I think using natural language for "coding" will enable broader adoption of automation tools, making us more productive. We will create our own apps tailored to our personal workflows.
📌 Similar workflows to the one above will soon be native in all email apps such as Outlook, see MS 365 Copilot announcement. Start thinking about how to use this capability already now.
📌 In doing this experiment, I learned a lot about using ChatGPT as an assistant, its limitations, and created an output that can be used to more efficiently consume the productivity related podcast episodes. However, if your end goal is to become more productive, the greatest challenge will still be to change or create new habits, which we haven't found a 100x solution for. Some things will still take time…
📌 Without ChatGPT I would not have taken on this task, it is an enabler of epic proportions. I was in the drivers seat making the process very fulfilling.

🤔 Have you tried any ambitious projects together with ChatGPT? What are your impressions?
🤔What is the first thing you will do when getting your hands on MS 365 Copilot (or similar)?

🌍Go ahead and explore

🧐For the curious reader, the following workflow was used:
1️⃣ Copy 100 email newsletters to a folder
2️⃣ Convert emails (eml-files) to txt-files
3️⃣ Summarize all text-files (the API cost was 0.5 USD)
4️⃣ Combine all text-files into one text-file
5️⃣ Use ChatGPT4 to create a table*, categorizing all data in the text-file from the step above.

*A table is easily converted to a mindmap
**The main challange was the limitations in input and output length.