How can AI actually make your day-to-day work easier, more fun and more effective? Here’s a snapshot of what a day in my working life looks like thanks to to AI—and how that makes more room for my parenting and personal priorities, too.
- 5:45 a.m. Queried three different AIs (Gemini, ChatGPT and Bing CoPilot) about customer pain points related to a new business offering. I gave the results (plus two reports the AIs had cited) to Claude, and asked it to synthesize into a memo I sent my colleague as prep for our 9 am call.
- 6:30 a.m. Forwarded three long email threads to a colleague who is joining a project in progress. Then I realized it would take her FOREVER to read them so instead I saved them to separate text files that I dragged into ChatGPT; then I asked it to turn the files into a briefing note covering 7 aspects of the project. I cleaned up its summary and filled in some gaps. Ten extra minutes of my time saved her probably 1-2 hours of work trying to make sense of the emails.
- 7 a.m. Call to figure out the basic approach to an ambitious data project. We brainstormed how AI could help, then brainstormed how to use AI to help us figure out even better ways to use AI.
- 8:30 a.m Setup new Coda team doc for the data project with demo tables showing how we can use Coda’s OpenAI integration to categorize data.
- 9:00 a.m. Jumped right into a working meeting by reviewing key points from the morning’s AI-generated research on customer pain points. Jointly reviewed relevant links that I added to a new Coda doc for our project. Tried but failed to use Bardeen to scrape and save the text of all the webpages in that list of links; ideally I’d have all the webpages saved so I could ask ChatGPT to summarize and then I’d paste summaries into our link table.
- 1:00 p.m. For a story I’m developing: Compiled background research on potential interview subjects into a Coda table, then used Coda’s AI integration to summarize my research into short bullets on each potential interview. Reviewed the summaries and made a short list of potential subjects; then emailed that list (with the AI-generated bio summaries) to my editor, and asked for his feedback on my coverage plan and list of potential interview subjects.
- 7:00 p.m. Used AI to quickly generate a couple of Excel formulas I needed to clean up a spreadsheet so I could prepare and share with a client.
- 10:00 p.m. Recapped my day to ChatGPT via voice interface on the phone app while getting ready for bed. Then asked GPT to put all my notes into chronological order, highlighting my AI use, so I could use its bullets as the outline (but not the text) for this post.
What’s missing from this summary? The big chunks of time I spent developing new ideas and insights because I had the room to dive deep. And the hours I spent talking with my homeschooled son’s tutor, support worker and behavioral consultant—important conversations that I now have room for in my AI-enabled workday.
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