Inside the Pod: Use ChatGPT to Super-charge Your Productivity

Thank you to everyone who is watching or listening to my podcast, How Do You Use ChatGPT? If you want to see a collection of all of the prompts and responses in one place, Every contributor Rhea Purohit is breaking them down for you to replicate. Let us know in the comments if you find these guides useful. —Dan Shipper

I’ve been writing essays based on Dan Shipper’s podcast How Do You Use ChatGPT? for nearly a month now, and I’ve settled into a weekly routine of sorts.

• On Monday or Tuesday, I watch the unedited version of the interview.
• I research the guest and write the first draft of my essay on Wednesday and Thursday.
• Then, on Saturday morning, I settle down with a cup of coffee and think about how to put the ideas I got from the episode into action in my own life.

After listening to Andreessen Horowitz’s Steph Smith talk about building businesses on the internet, for instance, I was inspired to create an online class about switching careers and taking the plunge into freelance writing. I promised myself I would put together an outline over the next week.

But when Monday rolled around, I found myself steeped in brand-new work, caught in the next week’s cycle of obligations, and the idea for the course completely slipped away into the ether.

Sometimes, the ghosts of forgotten ideas come back to haunt me, and when they do, I cut myself some slack, assuring myself that I couldn’t do justice to all these things at the same time. I can only do so much. This strategy, and coping mechanism, worked very well for me until Dan recorded an episode with Anne-Laure Le Cunff.

Le Cunff is the founder of Ness Labs, a newsletter and learning community of over 80,000 curious people aspiring to achieve ambitious goals while nourishing their mental well-being. She’s a Ph.D. candidate in psychology and neuroscience at King's College London. She is also writing a book, Liminal Minds, that explores the intersection between curiosity and ambition. The reason she’s able to do so much, she says, is ChatGPT.

In the episode, Le Cunff talks about how ChatGPT saves her time on administrative tasks for running her company. It makes her writing process more efficient, helping her create better outlines and fine-tune finished drafts. It also breaks down dense research papers so that she can incorporate them into her Ph.D. studies. 

This interview broadened my horizon of all the things I can get done. It was a call to action, pushing me to stop making excuses and start taking tangible action. Follow along for a close look at Le Cunff’s process and expand your spectrum of possibilities. 

We’ve divided this essay into sections, reflecting the ways in which Le Cunff uses ChatGPT to across her diverse roles:

• as a writer,
• as a busy founder,
• as a Ph.D. candidate, and
• as a curious person.

We’ve included screenshots of Le Cunff’s chat records to give you a closer look at her techniques. Our comments are peppered in using italics.

In the final section of this essay, we record how she and Dan experimented with ChatGPT together to help her improve her meditation practice—live on the show.

As a writer 

ChatGPT is integrated into Le Cunff’s writing routine. For example, Le Cunff takes us through how she wrote this piece exploring what “curiosity attractors”—the recurring fascinations that we can’t seem to shake off—tell us about ourselves.

When Le Cunff is gearing up to write something, she reads different articles for inspiration, adding the parts she finds relevant under a uniform tag in note-taking app Roam. She then creates a basic outline in Roam, by organizing the ideas she gathered under three headings: Introduction, Body, and Conclusion.

All screenshots courtesy of Anne-Laure Le Cunff and Dan Shipper.

Le Cunff exports this page from Roam as a PDF and uploads it to ChatGPT, with the following prompt.

Le Cunff: I’m writing an article about what I’m calling “curiosity attractors,” which are topics of interest we keep on coming back to, whose pull is almost too strong to ignore, that we know we will have to explore at some point in our life either through formal learning, a creative project, or any other way requiring a significant investment of time and energy. I have attached the rough outline. Please wear your editor’s hat. What aspects do you think I’m missing? Please be detailed and refer to research from theoretical concepts and/or empirical evidence in psychology and cognitive neuroscience when relevant.

ChatGPT identifies eight fields that Le Cunff should include in her article on curiosity attractors. Here’s a portion of what it said.

Le Cunff: Thank you! Please review the attached draft article on the topic of curiosity attractors and provide feedback on the clarity of the argument, the tone and voice, accessibility of the vocabulary, and if necessary suggest ways to improve the clarity, flow, and accessibility of the argument. Please include a bullet-point list of suggestions for improvements, keeping it specific to this draft.

Here’s part of ChatGPT’s feedback on Le Cunff’s draft.

As a busy founder

In her role as a busy founder, Le Cunff routinely comes across tasks that fall outside her circle of competence. She turns to ChatGPT when she doesn't feel the need to extend her expertise to being proficient at these odd jobs, and simply wants to do them quickly. Most recently, Le Cunff revamped her YouTube thumbnails—using ChatGPT to generate creative briefs based on video transcripts and Canva for design. Her first move was instructing ChatGPT with a detailed prompt based on YouTube creator Aprilynne Alter’s research on designing great thumbnails.

Le Cunff:

As a Ph.D. candidate 

A big part of getting a Ph.D. is reading a bunch of research papers. The problem is that research papers are dense documents, and it can take a fair amount of time to even understand if it's relevant to your specific area of study. Le Cunff has devised a system to make this process more efficient—her very own research paper triage.

Le Cunff has a Google Alert that sends papers which might be relevant to her research straight to her inbox. She then reads the abstract to determine if it's relevant to her broader field of study. When Le Cunff finds a paper she’s interested in, she asks ChatGPT questions to understand if the paper is applicable to her specific research question. 

As an experiment, Le Cunff uploads one of her own research papers as a PDF to ChatGPT, and then prompts it as follows.

Le Cunff: Based on the PDF attached, please answer the following question: What are the key considerations to take into account when implementing a neurophysiological measure of cognitive load in ADHD?

Le Cunff: Thank you. Still based on this PDF, how has eye-tracking been used to measure cognitive load in ADHD?

ChatGPT scans the research paper and notes that pupil dilation, fixation patterns, and saccadic movements are some of the ways eye-tracking has been employed as a method to infer cognitive load in ADHD. It also briefly explains each of these concepts.

While reading research papers, Le Cunff uses ChatGPT to understand concepts she is not familiar with. She does this by asking ChatGPT to decipher jargon from a related, but distinct field of science, and explain complex ideas to her in a simple manner.

As a curious person 

Le Cunff is in the constant pursuit of being a curious person. ChatGPT has become one of the tools she uses to explore the different things that pique her interest. The example Le Cunff cites is using ChatGPT to find the recipe for an obscure Algerian cheese.

Le Cunff is French-Algerian, and has recently been trying to reconnect with her Algerian roots. While reading an article about the country’s cuisine, Le Cunff stumbles upon the fact that cheese forms a big part of Algeria’s food culture. She wants to try and make a specific goat cheese called takemarit or kemariya. Le Cunff tries looking for a recipe online, searching both in English and in French, but comes up empty. She decides to turn to ChatGPT for help.

Le Cunff: What’s the recipe to make takemarit at home?

Le Cunff:

Le Cunff: Can you look up the recipe for takemarit in Arabic?

Le Cunff: Can you clean it up by combining steps or removing unnecessary information of steps, fix the grammar where needed, and fix the spelling to “kemariya” throughout?

Surfacing insights from meditation journal

Le Cunff designs an experiment where she committed to meditate for 15 minutes per day for 15 days and maintained a journal where she documented her feelings. Dan and Anne-Laure use ChatGPT to analyze her reflections from the perspective of an expert. They paste Le Cunff’s log into ChatGPT with the following prompt.

Dan and Anne-Laure: I just did an experiment where I meditated once a day for 15 minutes for 15 days. I kept a log, included below. I want to bring in a few experts to help me find interesting patterns and learnings about myself from the log. Can you read the log and recommend some experts that would have interesting insights for me about what’s contained in it?

ChatGPT recommends a variety of intriguing experts. Here’s some of what it says.

Dan and Anne-Laure: You are an expert physiologist with a particular interest in and experience with mindfulness and all sorts of meditation practices. I am a meditator who just did an experiment where I say every day for 15 minutes for 15 days and I kept a log. As an expert physiologist, I want you to read my log and give me a detailed summary of everything you notice. Be specific, detailed, organized, and don’t leave anything out. Be direct.

Here’s my log: [text of Le Cunff’s meditation journal]

Instead of analyzing the journal from the perspective of a physiologist, ChatGPT generates a summary of Le Cunff’s experience. 

Dan and Anne-Laure: Remember that you are an expert physiologist with a particular interest in and experience with mindfulness and all sorts of meditation practices. As an expert physiologist, I want you to read my log above and give me a detailed summary of everything you notice about my body and what’s going on with it. Be specific, detailed, organized, and don’t leave anything out. Be direct.

ChatGPT organizes all the sensations Le Cunff recorded in the sensation about her body. Here’s part of what it says. 

Dan and Anne-Laure: Thank you! I would like to feel more comfortable during my sessions. As an expert physiologist, do you have any suggestions based on my log for how I could adjust my posture or environment or otherwise in order to be more comfortable?

Based on Le Cunff’s log, ChatGPT generates various suggestions. Here’s some of what it said.

Le Cunff believes that ChatGPT’s ability to personalize suggestions is very powerful—and that people who have journaling and note-taking practices are better placed to leverage this ability because they can provide more data and context to ChatGPT. Le Cunff hopes it will encourage more people to develop these habits, enabling them to unlock the full potential of ChatGPT.

This conversation with Anne-Laure Le Cunff showed me how to do more than I ever thought possible, and to do it remarkably well. With that, I’m off to prompt ChatGPT to refine the bullet-point list about the freelance course I’d jotted down in a stray Google document that’s been hibernating in my Drive for far too long.