Hello! We are back with a new edition of About technology: AIa pop-up newsletter that teaches you about artificial intelligence, how it works and how to use it.
Last week I showed you how to turn AI into a personal shopper to speed up product research. Now let’s ask AI to try something more ambitious: help us set goals and organize our lives to achieve them.
Chatbots like ChatGPT and Bard, it turns out, are actually quite good at these tasks. I’ll help you ask a chatbot to create an action plan and help you learn new habits, including adding your goals to your calendar and to-do list.
First choose a goal! It helps if there is a self-help book with relevant advice. For example, say you want to run a marathon and you are just reading the book “Slow AF Run Club: The Ultimate Guide for Anyone Who Wants to Run”.
Choose a chatbot now. I’m using Open AI’s ChatGPT for this example with web browsing enabled in the settings, as the book is fairly new. Then try this prompt, which I adapted from PromptHero, a database of ChatGPT prompts that have helped people:
I want you to act as a life coach. I’ll provide some details about my current situation and goals, and it’s your job to come up with strategies that can help me make better decisions and achieve those goals. This can include giving advice on various topics, such as making plans for success or dealing with difficult emotions. My first request is: My goal this fall is to run a marathon. Come up with a three month plan following the principles of the book “Slow AF Run Club”.
ChatGPT can explain the premise of the book – that anyone, regardless of body size and fitness level, can train at their own pace to become a runner – and build a training plan using the principles from the book.
For example, at month 1, the chatbot may advise you to start with four 30-minute walks per week to get used to physical activity. Then in month 2 it will say to keep that frequency but to start jogging. Month 3 says to focus on jogging and increase the total time of your sessions to 45 minutes.
The next step is to take these suggestions and turn them into habits. You could manually plug the workouts into your calendar, but what’s the fun in that? On ChatGPT, using a plugin automation tool called Zapier, you can connect the chatbot to your Google Calendar and ask it to automatically integrate these workout recommendations into your calendar for you.
(Currently, only subscribers who pay $20 a month for ChatGPT Plus can use plugins. We explained how to do that in last week’s newsletter.)
Once you’ve connected Zapier to ChatGPT, go to the Zapier’s Open AI action menu and click ‘add a new action’. For the action, type “Google Calendar: Quickly add event.” Go through the steps to link your Google calendar account and click ‘Enable action’.
Once this is done, go back to ChatGPT. With the Zapier plugin selected, enter the prompt again and ask the bot to be your life coach. Now, after the bot finishes building the workout plan, type “add any workout to my calendar”.
From there, the bot looks at the training plan and automatically follows the training plan guidelines to add each session to your calendar. When it’s time to extend the duration of your runs, the calendar events will change to reflect that.
Pretty neat, but if you’re more of a to-do list kind of person, that’s a much simpler setup. Just tell your life coach that you will be sharing your to-do list regularly and that you want him to add these workouts to your to-do list on the suggested schedule.
For example, I told my life coach that I should rotate the tires at Costco this week, contact the health insurance company about a claim, write copy for this week’s newsletter, buy broccoli, and schedule phone calls with companies. It automatically spread these tasks out over the course of a week and went over the 30-minute walks.
Try using these steps for all of your life goals, such as saving money to buy a house or preparing yourself for a promotion at work. A little automation can turn vague advice into a more actionable plan.
After asking for a running plan, I told my life coach that I was overweight and out of shape after the pandemic. The chatbot reminded me that, based on the book’s principles, the goal is to run a marathon, not lose weight, and find pleasure in the process of running while getting rid of shame. It encouraged me to join a community of runners both in real life and online in communities like Reddit or Strava. That felt like good advice.
What’s next?
Next week we’ll discuss how students can take advantage of AI to study (not cheat).
