20 menial tasks ChatGPT handles in seconds, saving you hours

Write your emails for you

Dave Parrack / Foundry

We’ve all been faced with the tricky task of writing an email—whether personal or professional—but not knowing quite how to word it. ChatGPT can do the heavy lifting for you, penning the (hopefully) perfect email based on whatever information you feed it.

Let’s assume the email you need to write is of a professional nature, and wording it poorly could negatively affect your career. By directing ChatGPT to write the email with a particular structure, content, and tone of voice, you can give yourself a huge head start.

A winning tip for this is to never accept ChatGPT’s first attempt. Always read through it and look for areas of improvement, then request tweaks to ensure you get the best possible email. You can (and should) also rewrite the email in your own voice. Learn more about how ChatGPT coached my colleague to write better emails.

Generate itineraries and schedules

Dave Parrack / Foundry

If you’re going on a trip but you’re the type of person who hates planning trips, then you should utilize ChatGPT’s ability to generate trip itineraries. The results can be customized to the nth degree depending on how much detail and instruction you’re willing to provide.

As someone who likes to get away at least once a year but also wants to make the most of every trip, leaning on ChatGPT for an itinerary is essential for me. I’ll provide the location and the kinds of things I want to see and do, then let it handle the rest. Instead of spending days researching everything myself, ChatGPT does 80 percent of it for me.

As with all of these tasks, you don’t need to accept ChatGPT’s first effort. Use different prompts to force the AI chatbot to shape the itinerary closer to what you want. You’d be surprised at how many cool ideas you’ll encounter this way—simply nix the ones you don’t like.

Break down difficult concepts

Dave Parrack / Foundry

One of the best tasks to assign to ChatGPT is the explanation of difficult concepts. Ask ChatGPT to explain any concept you can think of and it will deliver more often than not. You can tailor the level of explanation you need, and even have it include visual elements.

Let’s say, for example, that a higher-up at work regularly lectures everyone about the importance of networking. But maybe they never go into detail about what they mean, just constantly pushing the why without explaining the what. Well, just ask ChatGPT to explain networking!

Okay, most of us know what “networking” is and the concept isn’t very hard to grasp. But you can do this with anything. Ask ChatGPT to explain augmented reality, multi-threaded processing, blockchain, large language models, what have you. It will provide you with a clear and simple breakdown, maybe even with analogies and images.

Break down big tasks into smaller tasks

Dave Parrack / Foundry

If you’ve spent even five minutes with ChatGPT, you know that it likes to break things down into sections and categories. Well, why not take advantage of that and utilize to your own benefit?

ChatGPT can help you break down overwhelmingly large tasks into smaller tasks that feel more manageable. The AI will check that you’re both on the same page, then identify the major components of the task at hand and chunk it down to bite-sized pieces.

You’ll end up with a set of small(er) tasks that you can then tackle in a step-by-step fashion—and once completed, you’ll see that you’ve achieved the monumental task you had in the first place.

Analyze and make tough decisions

Dave Parrack / Foundry

We all face tough decisions every so often. The next time you find yourself wrestling with a particularly tough one—and you just can’t decide one way or the other—try asking ChatGPT for guidance and advice.

It may sound strange to trust any kind of decision to artificial intelligence, let alone an important one that has you stumped, but doing so actually makes a lot of sense. While human judgment can be clouded by emotions, AI can set that aside and prioritize logic.

It should go without saying: you don’t have to accept ChatGPT’s answers. Use the AI to weigh the pros and cons, to help you understand what’s most important to you, and to suggest a direction. Who knows? If you find yourself not liking the answer given, that in itself might clarify what you actually want—and the right answer for you. This is the kind of stuff ChatGPT can do to improve your life.

Get weekly meal plans

Dave Parrack / Foundry

While artificial intelligence isn’t yet able to cook your food for you (though it’s only a matter of time), it can be used to plan out your meals. Just inform ChatGPT of any dietary requirements you may have, how much effort you’re willing to make, particular cuisine preferences, and your weekly budget. It’ll handle the rest.

ChatGPT can tell you what to buy at the grocery store at the start of the week, then generate a meal plan with recipes that suit your needs and wants. You can guide it as much as you want, too, such as by asking it to increase your fiber and protein intake.

Plan complex projects and strategies

Dave Parrack / Foundry

Most jobs come with some level of project planning and management. Even I, as a freelance writer, need to plan tasks to get projects completed on time. And that’s where ChatGPT can prove invaluable, breaking projects up into smaller, more manageable parts.

ChatGPT needs to know the nature of the project, the end goal, any constraints you may have, and what you have done so far. With that information, it can then break the project up with a step-by-step plan, and break it down further into phases (if required).

If ChatGPT doesn’t initially split your project up in a way that suits you, try again. Change up the prompts and make the AI chatbot tune in to exactly what you’re looking for. It takes a bit of back and forth, but it can shorten your planning time from hours to mere minutes.

Craft personalized workout routines

Dave Parrack / Foundry

If you’re keen to get fitter and if you have specific areas of improvement in mind or specific ways you want to grow, you can ask ChatGPT to provide personal workout routines for you. Inform it of your current fitness level, the goals you’re looking to achieve, what equipment you have access to, any physical limitations you might have, and it’ll do the rest.

For example, as someone who works from home, I asked ChatGPT to help me improve my posture and lose some weight. It duly created a daily 20-minute workout focused on those areas, but also provided some further tips to help me achieve my goals.

Plan parties or events

Dave Parrack / Foundry

If you enjoy planning parties or events, skip down to the next section. For the rest of us who find party and event planning to be nothing but a chore, we can hand it off to ChatGPT.

For this one, you need to be involved at the start (by defining the basic elements of your party or event) and the end (by actually inviting the guests, booking the entertainers, and organizing the catering).

But for everything in between, ChatGPT can connect the dots. That includes breaking down the planning stages into categories, creating a list of tasks in order of importance, suggesting themes, menus, and decorations, and contingencies in case something goes wrong.

Compile research notes

Dave Parrack / Foundry

If you need to research a given topic of interest, ChatGPT can save you the hassle of compiling that research. For example, ahead of a trip to Croatia, I wanted to know more about the Croatian War of Independence, so I asked ChatGPT to provide me with a brief summary of the conflict with bullet points to help me understand how it happened.

After absorbing all that information, I asked ChatGPT to add a timeline of the major events, further helping me to understand how the conflict played out. ChatGPT then offered to provide me with battle maps and/or summaries, plus profiles of the main players.

You can go even deeper with ChatGPT’s Deep Research feature, which is now available to free users, up to 5 Deep Research tasks per month. With Deep Research, ChatGPT conducts multi-step research to generate comprehensive reports (with citations!) based on large amounts of information across the internet. A Deep Research task can take up to 30 minutes to complete, but it’ll save you hours or even days.

Organize rough notes into documents

Dave Parrack / Foundry

If you’re anything like me, you probably make notes about lots of different things—whether digitally (using one of the many note-taking apps out there) or on paper, whether about work or personal issues. If you have trouble organizing those rough notes, let ChatGPT handle it for you. The AI chatbot can turn them into documents.

All you have to do is specify what style of document you want and ChatGPT will work its magic, grouping together related items, creating an outline, expanding your notes into fleshed-out sentences and paragraphs, then formatting it all into a document as requested.

On the other hand, if you have a lot of documents and want a quicker way to digest all of that information or find the answers you need using simple prompts, then check out Google’s NotebookLLM app, which uses its own AI to manage your notes, research, and documents.

Turn rough ideas into actionable plans

Dave Parrack / Foundry

ChatGPT isn’t just capable of turning notes into documents. It can also tough rough ideas into actionable plans.

Let’s say you’ve been kicking around the idea of starting a business and you have concepts of a plan as to what that business will end up looking like. By letting ChatGPT in on your ideas, you can have it create a timeline and sketch out a path on how to turn that dream into a reality.

It will work backwards from the end-goal business you have in mind, informing you of what you need to do in order to get there. This also applies to other unreached hopes you may have, from learning a new language to securing a promotion at work.

Convert file types

Dave Parrack / Foundry

ChatGPT can take the hard work out of converting text or data from one file type to another. All you need to do is upload the file you want to convert (whether it’s PDF, DOCX, CSV, etc.) and ChatGPT will extract the text or data, reformat it so that it’s compatible with the new file type, and export it as whatever file type you requested.

Converting files from one type to another is an interminably dull chore, so having ChatGPT do it for you is an absolute godsend. And ChatGPT doesn’t just cope well with single file conversions, but can manage batch conversions too. As with everything related to ChatGPT, though, I highly recommend checking for errors afterwards.

Summarize web articles

Dave Parrack / Foundry

There are only so many hours in the day, yet so many new articles published on the web day in and day out. When you come across extra-long reads, it can be helpful to run them through ChatGPT for a quick summary. Then, if the summary is lacking in any way, you can go back and plow through the article proper.

As an example, I ran one of my own PCWorld articles (where I compared Bluesky and Threads as alternatives to X) through ChatGPT, which provided a brief summary of my points and broke down the best X alternative based on my reasons given. Interestingly, it also pulled elements from other articles. (Hmph.) If you don’t want that, you can tell ChatGPT to limit its summary to the contents of the link.

Summarize emails and meetings

Dave Parrack / Foundry

If you have a white collar job, you probably deal with email chains, group discussions, and online meetings. The more people are involved in these, the trickier it can be to keep track of what’s being said, and important takeaways can get lost in the noise. ChatGPT to the rescue.

ChatGPT can quickly summarize email chains, group chat logs, and meeting transcripts. It only takes a minute to cut through the fluff and get key points on what actually mattered in the end.

This is a great trick to use for any long-form content that’s heavy on text, especially transcripts for interviews, lectures, videos, and Zoom meetings. The only caveat is to never share private details with ChatGPT, like company-specific data that’s protected by NDAs and the like.

Simplify legalese or policy documents

Dave Parrack / Foundry

Every now and then, life forces us to read through important documents before signing on a dotted line, whether to buy a house, get life insurance, rent a car, etc. The problem is, those documents are dripping with legalese—and if you’re like me, it’s hard to digest.

Thankfully, ChatGPT can help out here, dumbing down those policy documents into everyday language that’s easy enough to understand without needing a law degree. Just feed it the policy documents you’re being asked to sign and let it work its magic.

Check laws and regulations

Dave Parrack / Foundry

Understanding the various laws and/or rules that bind us can be tricky, especially since most of them are written in overly complex “legalese” that’s meant to avoid exploitable loopholes. Thankfully, ChatGPT is capable of not only checking rules and regulations, but also dumbing them down so that normies like me can understand them.

Just ask ChatGPT to explain a specific law or the rules and regulations surrounding whatever subject you’re exploring. It’ll likely ask you to clarify a few things (e.g., the jurisdiction you’re referring to or the organization making the rules) before providing an answer that defers to the most authoritative sources (e.g., government sites).

Create Q&A flashcards for learning

Dave Parrack / Foundry

Flashcards can be extremely useful for drilling a lot of information into your brain, such as when studying for an exam, onboarding in a new role, prepping for an interview, etc. And with ChatGPT, you no longer have to painstakingly create those flashcards yourself. All you have to do is tell the AI the details of what you’re studying.

You can specify the format (such as Q&A or multiple choice), as well as various other elements. You can also choose to keep things broad or target specific sub-topics or concepts you want to focus on. You can even upload your own notes for ChatGPT to reference. You can also use Google’s NotebookLM app in a similar way.

Create a learning or training schedule

Dave Parrack / Foundry

In a similar vein to the above, if you have a definitive idea in mind for a personal goal, ChatGPT can help you achieve it.

Let’s use language learning as an example. Just inform ChatGPT what level of Spanish (or whatever other language) you can speak right now and how fluent you want to be in the future. It will then create a learning schedule to follow to get you to that level.

The same goes if you’re seeking to, say, improve wellness and get in shape. Just tell ChatGPT what your current fitness level is and what level you want to end up at. It can then create a bespoke training schedule designed just for you and based on your specific needs.

Provide interview practice

Dave Parrack / Foundry

Whether you’re a first-time jobseeker or have plenty of experience under your belt, it’s always a good idea to practice for your interviews when making career moves. Years ago, you might’ve had to ask a friend or family member to act as your mock interviewer. These days, ChatGPT can do it for you—and do it more effectively.

Inform ChatGPT of the job title, industry, and level of position you’re interviewing for, what kind of interview it’ll be (e.g., screener, technical assessment, group/panel, one-on-one with CEO), and anything else you want it to take into consideration. ChatGPT will then conduct a mock interview with you, providing feedback along the way.

When I tried this out myself, I was shocked by how capable ChatGPT can be at pretending to be a human in this context. And the feedback it provides for each answer you give is invaluable for knocking off your rough edges and improving your chances of success when you’re interviewed by a real hiring manager.

Further reading: Usually creative ways to use ChatGPT