Happy Monday 🌞
I recently had the experience of reading an article and having that article completely change my mind on something. The article spoke about ‘joining the AI class’ and was written by Greg Shove and Taylor Malmsheimer.
The core concept is that you can’t ignore the impact that AI can have on your work and your career right now — that there will be this class of people ‘the AI class’ of workers who leverage AI to be more efficient. (I recommend reading the whole article for the full impact.)
Now I’ve thought about AI a lot, I’ve played with various tools, and I’ve read tons of articles about how to use AI and how others are using AI. But none of them ever landed this way. I’ve largely been using AI when it feels obvious or useful — coming up with headline ideas, asking random questions — but I haven’t been intentionally creating workflows with AI or trying to get better at using it.
This article changed my mind on that, so now I am trying to level up my AI skills. I haven’t downloaded a course, but I am purposefully trying to add AI into my existing workflows to produce better results.
Here’s what I’m trying so far:
Using AI as a brainstorming partner
I’ve come across this suggestion several times but never implemented it myself. I recently used AI to try and help me figure out what the best topics were for me to cover in our company all hands (where our team has five minutes to present, and I have access to two-and-a-half of those, so it needs to be tight). It was somewhat helpful, but will probably get better as I get better at prompting it.
A small business owner we had on Buffer’s blog recently shared that she uses the same approach in her post on how she’s grown her business using AI. “For instance, when we were struggling to meet our financial goal for a quarter, I outlined what we were aiming for and everything we were doing to achieve it in ChatGPT, and asked what additional approaches we could consider.”
Creating my own GPT for recurring prompts
Rolled out late last year, ChatGPT allows anyone to create their own GPT, which just means creating a chat with AI that is already pre-set with the knowledge, instructions, and skills you want it to reference every time. For example, if you always want to ask it to advise you on career advice, you can give it all of the context once and then start having a conversation knowing it has everything it needs. I tried setting one of these up for generating writing ideas, but it hasn’t quite panned out. I’m going to keep trying to set up others.
ChatGPT also offers access to other GPTs that folks have created, so I’m going to explore those a bit more, and I’ll share any good ones I find.
Generating ideas with AI
Like using AI to brainstorm, I’ve tried to lean into using AI to generate ideas when I need them. For example, headlines for blog posts, or outlines of job descriptions, or even outlines of agendas for team meetings. I’ve been going to ChatGPT and asking it to send me “15 headline ideas similar to…” and recently, I asked ChatGPT for suggestions for how to use it better (quite a meta experience). This feels like a light lift I can keep using AI for.
I’ll admit I’m not great at using AI yet. You need to be strong at creating prompts for what you want from AI, and that’s still a skill I’m still developing. Because it’s a new workflow, I also often forget to lean on AI for assistance in areas I could have likely used it. Still, I’m trying to be more mindful of adding AI to my work to hopefully grow in this skill a bit more.
I’d be curious to hear from others who are either very strong at using AI at work or interested in learning as well — I’m here for the resources and advice. 🙂
I hope you have a lovely week ahead. As always, feel free to reply if this sparks any thoughts or questions.
See you next week,
Hailley
P.S.: Just a note that I mention ChatGPT throughout this newsletter, but there are tons of tools. Another one I’ve used for writing and generating headlines is called Lex. Notion has built-in AI I’ve also played around with, and Buffer has an AI specifically for writing social media posts.
- I hate feeling like I’m dragging tasks from one day to the next week over week. Last year, I became interested in getting better at workload planning. In this article, I share ten strategies for mastering the art of workload planning, five from me, and five from people in my network who replied to me when I asked about this.
- Sharing one of my favorite projects at Buffer to date — I got to work with a team to redesign and relaunch this new Open Hub, which included Buffer’s first shareholders page and first annual shareholder letter. I’m very proud to see this new level of transparency from us.
- We’re hiring on the Marketing team at Buffer! Join us as a Senior Marketing Automation Manager. (Just a note: I’m not the hiring manager for this role, though I am reviewing applications.)
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