AI Productivity
Practical workflows for personal admin, reading, decisions, documents, and daily knowledge work.
62 stories (36 articles · 26 videos)
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6 min readThe 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.
New to AI
6 min readAI 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.
New to AI
8 min readUsing AI to stress-test decisions: frameworks, trade-offs, and counterarguments
A four-step workflow for using AI to clarify a decision, generate alternatives, surface counterarguments, and keep uncertainty and human accountability explicit.
BeginnerMore in this topic
7 min readYour AI agrees with you too much: four thinking-partner failures
AI can help you examine a decision, but it also inherits your framing, rewards confident prose, and quietly encourages you to outsource judgement. Here is how to catch each failure.
Beginner
7 min readSpaced practice, retrieval, and interleaving—with AI doing the right work
Build a practical study system around three evidence-backed learning techniques, two of them strongly supported and one more tentative. AI prepares questions and feedback; you perform the retrieval and make the distinctions.
Beginner
7 min readWhy AI explanations feel like learning—and often aren't
A fluent explanation can make a subject feel familiar before you can actually use it. These three tests reveal whether AI helped you learn or merely helped you follow along.
New to AI
11 min readAI coding without being a developer: building tools in Cursor and Claude Code
AI coding tools can help non-developers prototype small internal tools. This guide explains a test-first workflow, its limits, and when an experienced engineer must take over.
Intermediate
7 min readAI 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.
New to AI
7 min readAI for learning a new skill: a 30-day self-study plan
A 30-day AI-supported study scaffold built around practice, retrieval, feedback, and a real project, with clear limits on curriculum and assessment claims.
Beginner
7 min readAI for meetings: transcripts, summaries, and action items
A realistic workflow for capturing meetings with AI: choose an approved data path, review the transcript, and turn explicit evidence into decisions and follow-ups.
Beginner
8 min readAI for spreadsheets: cleaning, analyzing, and charting data
A practical guide to using AI with spreadsheets: drafting formulas, checking messy data, building summaries and charts, and verifying every result.
Beginner
6 min readAI as your personal editor: three bounded editing passes
Three bounded editing passes for clarity, tone, and grammar, with privacy checks, quoted changes, and the author retaining the final wording.
New to AI
7 min readUse AI to Triage Long Documents and PDFs Safely
Use a source-grounded three-pass workflow to map a long document, locate passages for human review, and prepare questions without outsourcing the reading or legal judgment.
New to AI
7 min readAI voice and audio: from cloning to podcasts to translation
An orientation map for voice cloning, narration, transcription, and translation, with consent, disclosure, privacy, and verification boundaries.
Beginner
6 min readAI 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.
New to AI
10 min readBuilding an always-on briefing or newsletter with AI
Build an automated daily or weekly briefing with traceable sources, permission-aware collection, explicit quality checks, and a maintenance loop.
Intermediate
8 min readThe anatomy of a prompt: role, context, task, constraints, format
A five-part template for making important prompts clearer, easier to review, and easier to improve. With worked examples, common mistakes, and a practical order.
Beginner
10 min readBuild a personal RAG: chat with your own documents
Build and evaluate a bounded document-grounded assistant. Compare hosted notebooks, project workspaces, and configurable retrieval without weakening provenance or permissions.
Intermediate
6 min readUsing ChatGPT to write emails you actually want to send
A privacy-aware workflow for using ChatGPT to draft, sharpen, and finish emails without handing over confidential threads or outsourcing the final judgement.
New to AI
7 min readChatGPT Voice mode: talking to AI like a friend
Talking to AI feels strange for about ninety seconds, then it often becomes the easiest interface for thinking out loud. A practical guide to voice mode — what it is great at, what it is bad at, and how to actually use it.
New to AI
8 min readCustom GPTs and Claude Projects: reusable assistants with knowledge files
A practical guide to deciding whether a repeated task belongs in a reusable, file-backed assistant, then building and testing one with an explicit privacy boundary.
Beginner
8 min readCustom instructions and memory: set up your AI once
Configure stable, non-sensitive defaults and memory controls, then review what is retained and override stale context when the task changes.
Beginner
8 min readDeep Research mode: frame the question and audit the sources
Deep Research — the multi-step web research mode in ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and similar tools — can return a cited, structured report after a longer autonomous run. A practical guide to framing questions, auditing sources, and knowing when not to use it.
Beginner
7 min readFew-shot prompting: steer output by example
When a description leaves room for interpretation, show the model representative input-output examples and test whether they improve consistency on your task.
Beginner
6 min readBuild Your First Custom GPT and Test It
Configure a reusable ChatGPT assistant, test it on representative tasks, and revise its instructions before relying on it.
New to AI
7 min readBuild and Validate a Small Zapier AI Automation
Build a low-consequence Zapier workflow with test data, visible failures, source links, and a human review gate before it handles real content.
Beginner
8 min readInbox Zero with AI: a realistic email workflow
A practical, repeatable system for triaging, drafting, and chasing email with AI without handing an unapproved tool access to your inbox or letting it send unchecked.
Beginner
7 min readLearning 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.
New to AI
11 min readMulti-tool AI workflows: design reliable handoffs across tools
A practical framework for combining research, document grounding, drafting, critique, analysis, and storage while preserving provenance, privacy, and review.
Intermediate
8 min readNotebookLM: Build a Source-Grounded Research Notebook
Build a focused NotebookLM collection, ask source-grounded questions, and verify the cited passage before relying on an answer.
Beginner
11 min readBuilding reusable prompt libraries: from snippets to shared templates
When the same AI-assisted task recurs, a prompt library can make the workflow easier to reproduce and evaluate. A practical system for capturing, testing, versioning, and sharing templates.
Intermediate
6 min readSharing 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.
New to AI
8 min readStop prompting once: the iterative conversation method
A practical workflow for improving a promising first response through critique, narrowing, pivots, stress tests, and verification instead of restarting by default.
Beginner
8 min readTen prompt patterns for everyday knowledge work
Ten reusable prompt shapes for drafting, critique, analysis, rehearsal, and structured output, with a validation habit for each kind of work.
Beginner
7 min readWriting with AI without sounding like AI
AI-assisted drafts often fall into generic patterns. Use six editing checks to recover specificity and rhythm without pretending that style alone proves who wrote the text.
Beginner
6 min readYour first hour with ChatGPT: a click-by-click walkthrough
A guided sixty-minute tour of ChatGPT — from signing up to a useful first result, with the product and privacy controls that matter most.
New to AI
37 minutesI Tried AI as a Life Coach for 365 Days - Here's What I Learned
Ali Abdaal. Lays out related 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). It also names boundaries around mental health and accountability, matching the article's use of generated advice as one input rather than a decision.
Beginner
10 minutesLand 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
9 minutesI 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
17 minutesHow 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 minutesHow 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
13 minutesHow 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
4 minutesHow 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
18 minutesHow 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 minutesExcel'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
23 minutesHow 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
90 minutesThe 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
18 minutesThis 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 minutesHow 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
11 minutes4 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
22 minutesAI 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 minutesHow 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).
Beginner13 minutesHow 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 minutes101 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
32 minutesHow 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 minutesHow 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
30 minutesAI Tools You'll Use Everyday (And How To Use Them)
Matt Wolfe. Matt explains the stack he used when recording the video and why he assigned particular writing, research, transcription, capture, and image tasks to particular products. That makes the video a useful case study in task routing, provided you treat its product choices as dated examples rather than current defaults.
Intermediate14 minutes101 Ways To Use AI In Your Daily Life
Tina Huang. The video offers a catalogue of use cases across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity. It can help you identify candidate workflow stages, but its product mappings are hypotheses to test rather than evidence that one tool is the best route.
Intermediate
28 minutes35+ 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 minutesHow 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.
Beginner14 minutes101 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 AI90 minutesThe 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