Topic
AI Productivity
Practical workflows for personal admin, reading, decisions, documents, and daily knowledge work.
59 stories (33 articles · 26 videos)
Start here
A few good first pieces before you browse the full feed.
6 min readArticle
The seven things you can ask ChatGPT on day one
The blank input box is the hardest part. Seven copyable prompts that turn an empty conversation into a real win on your very first day.
Understand the idea well enough to try it safely in a low-risk setting.
New to AI
6 min readArticle
AI for travel, recipes, and life admin
The low-stakes, high-frequency wins that turn AI from a curiosity into a habit. Real prompts for trip planning, meal planning, household admin, and the small decisions that eat your week.
Understand the idea well enough to try it safely in a low-risk setting.
New to AI
8 min readArticle
Using AI for better decisions: frameworks, pros/cons, and devil's advocate
AI is an unusually good sparring partner for decisions — if you stop using it as an answer machine. A workflow for using AI to make better choices, with the prompts that force it to disagree, not agree.
Turn the workflow into a small practical experiment with a clear quality check.
Beginner
More in this topic
10 min readArticle
Building an always-on briefing or newsletter with AI
An automated daily briefing or newsletter that arrives in your inbox, with content actually worth reading, is one of the highest-leverage AI builds. The architecture, the prompts, and the discipline that makes it sustainable.
Evaluate the implementation pattern, failure modes, and guardrails before building.
Intermediate
11 min readArticle
AI coding without being a developer: building tools in Cursor and Claude Code
Non-developers can now build real software with AI. A practical guide to using Cursor and Claude Code as a non-engineer — what's realistic, what's not, and the discipline that separates useful tools from broken ones.
Evaluate the implementation pattern, failure modes, and guardrails before building.
Intermediate
10 min readArticle
Build a personal RAG: chat with your own documents (no code)
Build your own document-grounded chat in under an hour, with no code. The three no-code options worth using in 2026, the tradeoffs, and the patterns that distinguish a useful RAG from a frustrating one.
Build a document-grounded assistant and know when stale, low-quality, or out-of-scope sources make answers unsafe.
Intermediate
11 min readArticle
Multi-tool workflows: combining ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Notion
Most people use one AI tool for everything. Intermediate users orchestrate four or five — each for the part it does best. A practical guide to building multi-tool workflows that compound.
Design repeatable AI workflows across tools without losing source of truth, privacy boundaries, or handoff quality.
Intermediate
11 min readArticle
Building reusable prompt libraries: from snippets to shared templates
Once you use AI seriously, you write the same kinds of prompts over and over. A practical system for building, organising, and sharing a prompt library — what to capture, how to version, and what infrastructure to use.
Turn individual prompts into shared, versioned templates with owners, examples, and quality checks.
Intermediate
7 min readArticle
Your first no-code automation: Zapier + AI in 20 minutes
Build your first useful AI automation in twenty minutes. A walk-through of Zapier with AI — auto-summarising new emails into Slack — plus four other patterns to copy and the gateway it opens into agent territory.
Build a small AI automation with filters, validation, fallback behavior, and clear ownership.
Beginner
7 min readArticle
AI for learning a new skill: a 30-day self-study plan
A structured 30-day approach to using AI as a personal tutor and curriculum designer. Four weeks, four phases, with the exact prompts and the habits that make learning stick.
Turn the workflow into a small practical experiment with a clear quality check.
Beginner
8 min readArticle
The ten prompt patterns every knowledge worker should know
Ten reusable patterns — not one-off prompts, but reusable shapes — that cover the vast majority of practical AI use at work. Memorise these and you have an entire prompt-engineering toolkit.
Choose prompt patterns by job type and pair them with validation instead of memorizing prompt recipes.
Beginner
8 min readArticle
Custom GPTs and Claude Projects: reusable assistants with knowledge files
Anything you do with AI twice or more is a candidate for a Custom GPT or Claude Project. A practical guide to building reusable, file-backed assistants — when to use which, and the patterns that compound.
Turn the workflow into a small practical experiment with a clear quality check.
Beginner
7 min readArticle
AI voice and audio: from cloning to podcasts to translation
AI audio in 2026 covers four useful categories — voice cloning, narration, transcription, and translation. A practical tour of the tools that actually work, with concrete use cases per category.
Turn the workflow into a small practical experiment with a clear quality check.
Beginner
8 min readArticle
Deep Research mode: a 20-page report without reading 50 tabs
Deep Research — the autonomous research feature in ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity — produces in fifteen minutes what used to take you a day. A practical guide to using it well.
Turn the workflow into a small practical experiment with a clear quality check.
Beginner
8 min readArticle
NotebookLM: turn any source into a personal knowledge base
Google's NotebookLM is the easiest way to chat with your own documents — books, papers, meeting notes, research files. A practical tour of what it does, where it shines, and the four use cases worth setting up this week.
Turn the workflow into a small practical experiment with a clear quality check.
Beginner
8 min readArticle
AI for spreadsheets: cleaning, analyzing, and charting data
A practical guide to using AI to handle spreadsheets — cleaning messy data, writing formulas, building pivot tables, and turning rows of numbers into clear answers. Works in Excel, Google Sheets, or via ChatGPT directly.
Turn the workflow into a small practical experiment with a clear quality check.
Beginner
7 min readArticle
Writing with AI without sounding like AI
AI writing has a smell. Once you know what it is, you can stop producing it. Six concrete tells, six fixes, and a workflow that uses AI to make your writing better without making it sound like everyone else's.
Turn the workflow into a small practical experiment with a clear quality check.
Beginner
8 min readArticle
Inbox Zero with AI: a realistic email workflow
A practical, repeatable system for triaging, drafting, and chasing email with AI — without needing a developer, an automation builder, or a productivity guru.
Turn the workflow into a small practical experiment with a clear quality check.
Beginner
7 min readArticle
AI for meetings: transcripts, summaries, and action items
A realistic workflow for capturing meetings with AI — which tool to use, what it captures well, what it captures badly, and the prompt that turns a transcript into actual decisions and follow-ups.
Turn the workflow into a small practical experiment with a clear quality check.
Beginner
7 min readArticle
Custom instructions and memory: set up your AI once
Spend ten minutes once and stop re-explaining yourself to ChatGPT every conversation. A practical guide to custom instructions, memory, and projects across the major AI tools.
Configure reusable assistant context while avoiding stale memory and accidental disclosure of sensitive details.
Beginner
7 min readArticle
Few-shot prompting: teach AI by example
When you cannot describe what you want, show it. Few-shot prompting — giving the model 2-3 examples of the output style — is the single fastest way to get consistent, on-brand results.
Turn the workflow into a small practical experiment with a clear quality check.
Beginner
8 min readArticle
Stop prompting once: the iterative conversation method
The single biggest gap between mediocre and good AI output is what happens after the first response. A workflow for turning any first draft into a real one through iteration — not by re-prompting from scratch.
Turn a weak first answer into usable output through critique, narrowing, pivots, and stress tests.
Beginner
8 min readArticle
The anatomy of a prompt: role, context, task, constraints, format
A five-part template that lifts answer quality from "meh" to "useful" on any prompt, in any AI tool. With worked examples, common mistakes, and the order that matters.
Build prompts with role, context, task, constraints, examples, and output format instead of relying on one-off wording tricks.
Beginner
7 min readArticle
AI for job hunting: CVs, cover letters, and interview prep
A practical AI workflow for the job hunt — tailoring your CV to each role, drafting cover letters that sound like you, rehearsing interviews out loud, and the steps most candidates skip.
Understand the idea well enough to try it safely in a low-risk setting.
New to AI
6 min readArticle
Your first "Custom GPT": a personalised assistant in 10 minutes
Build a personalised AI assistant — your own tutor, recipe helper, or work coach — by filling in a form. No code, no setup, ten minutes.
Understand the idea well enough to try it safely in a low-risk setting.
New to AI
7 min readArticle
Using AI to read long documents, contracts, and PDFs
Drop in a 40-page document and get the parts that matter — the decisions, the risks, the things you would otherwise miss. A practical workflow for using AI to read what you do not have time to read.
Understand the idea well enough to try it safely in a low-risk setting.
New to AI
6 min readArticle
AI vs Google: when to search, when to ask
Search and AI assistants are not interchangeable. A practical guide to which tool fits which question — with side-by-side examples and the cases where you should use both.
Understand the idea well enough to try it safely in a low-risk setting.
New to AI
6 min readArticle
Sharing images with AI: what you can (and shouldn't) upload
Modern AI can read photos, charts, screenshots, and handwriting almost as easily as text. A practical guide to what works, what doesn't, and the thirty-second privacy checklist before you upload anything.
Understand the idea well enough to try it safely in a low-risk setting.
New to AI
7 min readArticle
ChatGPT Voice mode: talking to AI like a friend
Talking to AI feels strange for about ninety seconds, then it becomes the most natural interface there is. A practical guide to voice mode — what it is great at, what it is bad at, and how to actually use it.
Understand the idea well enough to try it safely in a low-risk setting.
New to AI
7 min readArticle
Learning anything faster with AI: from "explain like I'm 12" to practice quizzes
A four-prompt loop that turns any AI into a private tutor — explainer, examples, practice, and feedback. Works for any topic, any background.
Understand the idea well enough to try it safely in a low-risk setting.
New to AI
6 min readArticle
AI as your personal editor: fix any writing in under a minute
Three small prompts that turn any AI into a careful, fast editor — without it rewriting you into someone you are not. One pass each for clarity, tone, and grammar.
Understand the idea well enough to try it safely in a low-risk setting.
New to AI
6 min readArticle
Using ChatGPT to write emails you actually want to send
Most AI emails sound like AI. A practical workflow for using ChatGPT to draft, sharpen, and finish the emails you would actually press send on — without the robot smell.
Understand the idea well enough to try it safely in a low-risk setting.
New to AI
6 min readArticle
Your first hour with ChatGPT: a click-by-click walkthrough
A guided sixty-minute tour of ChatGPT — from signing up to your first real win. Every button, every setting that matters, in order.
Understand the idea well enough to try it safely in a low-risk setting.
New to AI
14 minutesVideo
101 Ways To Use AI In Your Daily Life
Tina Huang. A fast catalogue of concrete use cases mapped to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity. Good for seeding ideas for which step in your workflow actually belongs in which tool, rather than defaulting everything to one chatbot.
Intermediate
30 minutesVideo
AI Tools You'll Use Everyday (And How To Use Them)
Matt Wolfe. Matt walks through the exact stack he uses daily — Claude for writing and Projects, Perplexity for research, plus the supporting cast for transcription, capture and images — and is honest about why each tool earns its slot. This is the closest analogue on YouTube to the article's "pick a default for each job" framing.
Intermediate
17 minutesVideo
How to Become a Speed Learner (with ChatGPT)
Tina Huang. Walks through the structured self-study system Huang used to learn SQL in 11 days for a Meta interview — active recall, spaced repetition, and using ChatGPT to generate practice problems and explain mistakes. Useful as the "how do I actually execute my plan" follow-up to the primary pick.
Beginner
22 minutesVideo
How to learn to code FAST using ChatGPT (it's a game changer seriously)
Tina Huang. Hands you a study-plan prompt template ("Act as a coding tutor that creates study plans…") that takes the student's goal, time commitment, and resource preferences, then generates a structured plan. The framing is coding, but the prompt pattern is exactly what the article applies to any 30-day learning sprint.
Beginner
37 minutesVideo
I Tried AI as a Life Coach for 365 Days - Here's What I Learned
Ali Abdaal. Lays out the same kinds of patterns the article uses — challenge prompts ("give me the steelman counterargument," "give me a scathing critique"), explanatory theories, and the Solomon method (have the AI play your 90-year-old self) — and is unusually clear about where the AI stops being useful (mental health, accountability). Pairs well with the article's insistence that the value is in better questions and tradeoff-mapping, not "tell me what to do."
Beginner
22 minutesVideo
AI For Data Analysis In 21 Minutes
Tina Huang. Tina puts Perplexity's Deep Research and ChatGPT/Claude analysis modes in the context of a working analyst's day — pulling together market signals, exploratory data analysis, and structured outputs. Useful as the "what else is this good for besides academic literature reviews" companion to the primary pick.
Beginner
14 minutesVideo
How to Use ChatGPT's Deep Research to Save HOURS on Research
Andy Stapleton. Stapleton runs Deep Research against the exact use case it shines at — a literature review with a clear scope, time frame, and structure — and shows the clarifying-questions handshake, the 10-minute wait, the 40-source output, and where the citations and tone still need a human pass. Calls out the limits honestly (no BibTeX export, occasionally too generous in source choice).
Beginner
28 minutesVideo
35+ INSANE Ways To Use NotebookLM (For FREE)
Matt Wolfe. Once you understand the basics, this is the right second video. Matt runs through a long list of less obvious uses — turning a book into a study guide, briefing yourself on a competitor from their content, generating mind maps from a folder of PDFs — that help you see how flexible the "grounded notebook" frame actually is.
Beginner
35 minutesVideo
How To Master NotebookLM in 2026 (Free Course)
Paul J Lipsky. A clean three-step framing — curate sources, ask the right questions, produce final outputs — that maps almost one-to-one onto how the article tells you to think about NotebookLM. Recent enough (early 2026) to match the current UI, including Studio, audio overviews, and mind maps.
Beginner
18 minutesVideo
How to Improve Your Excel Skills with ChatGPT
Leila Gharani. Older (early 2023) but still the cleanest worked example of pasting a real Excel question into ChatGPT, getting a SUMPRODUCT-or-conditional-formatting answer back, and then iterating with the model when the first formula doesn't quite fit. The model has improved a lot; the prompting workflow she shows is the same one you'll use today.
Beginner
12 minutesVideo
Excel's New AI Function is Absolutely Insane (Copilot Function)
Leila Gharani. Live demo of the new `=COPILOT()` function on the kinds of messy real data the article describes — shift handover notes turned into a structured action table, free-text reviews tagged for sentiment, and inconsistent job titles normalized against a master list. Also calls out the limits clearly: don't use it for anything that has to be exact, freeze results as values when you're done.
Beginner
90 minutesVideo
The Ultimate Guide to Writing with AI
David Perell. Perell teaches writing for a living and walks through how he actually drafts with LLMs without the output reading as AI — what he uses the model for (research, structuring, surfacing his own thinking), what he refuses to delegate (voice, taste, opinions), and the specific moves he uses to keep his prose his. Sits just under the 100K-view bar but earns its place because the topic is genuinely niche and this is the most thoughtful long-form take on it.
Beginner
13 minutesVideo
How to Use Copilot to Automate Meeting Notes in Microsoft Teams!
Scott Brant. Scott Brant's broader Copilot work is the closest thing to an honest demo of how an integrated AI assistant changes the daily Outlook/Teams loop — drafting replies, summarizing threads, pulling action items into tasks. Nominally about meetings, but the same reflexes transfer straight to Outlook for anyone in a Microsoft 365 shop. (No single AI-for-email video clears the 100k-view bar with a beginner inbox-zero focus, so this is the strongest adjacent walkthrough.)
Beginner
14 minutesVideo
101 Ways To Use AI In Your Daily Life
Tina Huang. Tina lists where AI actually pays off across a workday and several entries are exactly the email moves the article describes — checking and summarizing inboxes, drafting replies, editing for tone, organizing brain-dumped tasks. Useful as a reality check on what's worth automating versus what just needs a better template.
Beginner
4 minutesVideo
How To Use Otter AI To Transcribe Audio - Features and Overview
Elegant Themes. Short overview of Otter as a standalone transcriber for people who don't live in Teams — Otter Pilot joining meetings on your behalf, calendar/Zoom integration, file uploads, and the free tier limits. Useful as a four-minute orientation before deciding which of the article's tools you want to actually try.
Beginner
13 minutesVideo
How to Use Copilot to Automate Meeting Notes in Microsoft Teams!
Scott Brant. A clean, end-to-end walkthrough of what the article describes: enable transcription, ask Copilot questions live, get an audio recap and a Word minutes document afterwards, and pull action items out into a follow-up workflow. Scott Brant is a Microsoft 365 educator who does this every week, and the demo is on a real meeting rather than a contrived one.
Beginner
9 minutesVideo
I wish every Job Seeker would watch this
Jeff Su. Part two of the same series, covering the parts of the job search the first video doesn't — landing coffee chats via LinkedIn, asking good questions in the interview, writing thank-you emails, and the role-play prompt for practising salary negotiation. Watch this after the article and you'll have ChatGPT-assisted scripts for every awkward part of the funnel, not just the application itself.
New to AI
10 minutesVideo
Land a Job using ChatGPT: The Definitive Guide!
Jeff Su. Ten minutes of the most-watched ChatGPT-for-job-search video on YouTube, and it earns it. Jeff shows the multi-prompt approach for tailoring a cover-letter hook to a real job description, then the "rewrite this bullet as I accomplished X by doing Y resulting in Z" pattern for resumes, then a clean walk-through of preparing the "tell me about yourself" answer. The exact moves the article recommends, demonstrated on screen with the prompts visible.
New to AI
18 minutesVideo
This NotebookLM + Perplexity Workflow Will Cut Your Research Time by 50% (or More)
Grace Leung. A more practical two-tool workflow: Perplexity for finding the documents and citations, NotebookLM for actually reading and synthesising them. Useful if your "long document" problem is really a "long stack of documents" problem — market research, regulatory filings, multi-source reports.
New to AI
26 minutesVideo
How to Use NotebookLM (Google's AI "Tool for Understanding")
Tiago Forte. NotebookLM is the AI tool the article most enthusiastically recommends for long documents, and Tiago Forte — the Building a Second Brain guy — gives the cleanest tour of why. He demonstrates summarising meeting notes, querying long PDFs, and the source-grounding feature that stops the model from inventing facts the documents don't contain. After watching, you'll understand why "upload the PDF to NotebookLM" is the article's default suggestion.
New to AI
23 minutesVideo
How I Turned ChatGPT Into My Personal Assistant
AI Edge. The title is louder than the content. Underneath it is a calm tour of using a long-running ChatGPT thread for meal planning, calendar/booking work, errand triage, and trip prep — exactly the unglamorous "life admin" jobs the article covers. The "external memory" idea at the end (a small Google Doc the assistant reads back into each session) is the practical fix for the most common beginner complaint: "it keeps forgetting what I told it last week."
New to AI
32 minutesVideo
How To Learn Anything 10x Faster Than Anyone With AI
Dan Koe. A different angle on the same problem: pick a real project, then let the AI surface only what you need to know to finish it. Useful counterweight to the Mike and Matty video if you learn better by building than by studying, and it pushes back gently on the "consume more courses" reflex.
New to AI
10 minutesVideo
How to learn anything fast using ChatGPT | Full guide to studying with AI
Mike and Matty. A 10-minute framework — Construct, Connect, Challenge — applied with specific ChatGPT prompts for each phase: ask for a syllabus, ask for analogies, ask for a practice test, ask for feedback on your explanation. These prompts work on essentially any subject from physiology to programming, and the tone is exactly the article's: AI as a tutor, not a substitute for thinking.
New to AI
90 minutesVideo
The Ultimate Guide to Writing with AI
David Perell. David Perell is a working writer who teaches writing online, and this is his actual workflow — where he asks AI to argue with his draft, where he refuses to let it generate prose for him, and what prompts he keeps coming back to. The sections "How do I actually write with LLMs" and "How I think with LLMs" map directly onto the article's "use AI as an editor, not a ghostwriter" stance. The view count is just under our usual 100k bar; we made the exception because no larger-channel video on this exact topic is anywhere near this thoughtful.
New to AI
11 minutesVideo
4 ChatGPT Hacks that Cut My Workload in Half
Jeff Su. The "red team technique" section is the missing piece in most ChatGPT-for-email tutorials: write the draft, then ask the model to roleplay the recipient who gets fifty cold emails a day and tell you which sentences make them hit delete. That feedback loop is exactly what the article means by "emails you actually want to send," and Jeff demonstrates it on a real cold outreach email in under three minutes.
New to AI
14 minutesVideo
101 Ways To Use AI In Your Daily Life
Tina Huang. Tina Huang sorts a hundred-plus everyday AI use cases into productivity, daily life, learning, careers and relationships — and crucially walks through each one fast, with the actual prompt or screen on display. It's the most efficient way to see what "asking ChatGPT something" can actually look like beyond the seven examples in the article, without sitting through a 40-minute course.
New to AI