Paperwork Headache + ChatGPT = Time Savings

I've been using ChatGPT for my daily work for a few months now - but this little lightbulb only went on for me recently, so I thought I’d share it, so you can spot opportunities to apply it in your own work or personal life.

Sometimes you'll see this "Analysing" spinner in ChatGPT…

If you hover over it, it will reveal its workings - which in many cases means it's doing some programming behind the scenes for you, then running the code to help answer your question.

Here's a real example I used to get my tax return done earlier this year.

My problem was that I didn't capture my mileage/odometer reading at exactly the start and end of the tax year.

I did have a few notes from my logbook and other documents like services, which I put in a simple list.

Here's what I asked ChatGPT...

In response, ChatGPT did the following:

• Explained how it was going to tackle the problem

• Suggested some code to get the result

• Ran the code itself, without prompting

• Also unprompted, it drew a graph of the data to illustrate a point about  the accuracy of the result

• Finally, it gave me the result

The moral of this story is that you don't need ChatGPT to teach you how to write code. In many situations, it will do that for you and just give you the result.

I've found it really useful to leave this toggle in the on position so that I can get a better understanding of what it's capable of doing, over time. Access it from your profile icon (top right corner of the ChatGPT window) > Settings > General:

Here's the actual transcript, if you're interested....

Andrew Walker
Technology consulting for charities
https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-walker-the-impatient-futurist/