ChatGPT Productivity Tips: How a Freelancer Saves 20 Hours a Week

As a freelancer, time is your most valuable resource. With a constantly changing workload, finding ways to be more productive is essential for success. That's where ChatGPT comes in. This AI-powered tool can help you save up to 20 hours a week by automating tasks such as summarizing long meetings, rewriting emails, repurposing blog posts, planning content, and even writing content. 

Before diving into ways you can save time, let me share my quest to ChatGPT.

It All Started with Jarvis: Journey to ChatGPT Productivity  

When Jarvis.ai (now Jasper) was launched, I thought it was fun to try. I’ve always thought about how cool it is to have an AI like Jarvis from the Iron Man films. 

Using Jasper as an AI tool was something I did for fun in 2021. But I ended up impressed as to how much time it saved me! It used to take me 6 hours to write a blog post. Most of that time was spent worrying about writer’s block! Nowadays, it takes me two hours to write an entire blog post, including editing and finding images. 
Since then, I’ve been obsessed with discovering new AI productivity tools to help me save more time and do more. Naturally, when ChatGPT was released, I was hooked. Depending on the volume of work in a week, ChatGPT saves me between 5-20 hours per week doing various tasks, such as summarizing, rewriting, and writing content. 

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The Best ChatGPT Productivity Tool for Meetings 

As a freelancer, you spend a lot of your time in meetings. Getting on a sales call with a potential client is something that you regularly do. Or spending an hour joining status or strategy meetings can add up. 

On average, remote professionals spend 3 hours per week in meetings. On the other hand, around 30% spend 5 hours, especially if you’re managing a project or a team. 

On top of attending meetings, you’ll also have to go through your meeting notes. If you have the transcript, you’ll have to go through the most important insights and action items.

So, how can you use ChatGPT to help you be more productive around meetings? You can use it to:

• Summarize long meetings. 
• Identify action items. 
• Prepare the agenda for the next meeting.

Read our blog post on the step-by-step process of how to use ChatGPT to summarize long meetings. And because this post is to help you save time, the best way to use GPT-3 for your meeting is to use a free Chrome extension like Tactiq.
Here’s how it works: 

1. Install the free Tactiq Chrome extension. 
2. Connect it with your Zoom, Google Meet, or Teams account. 
3. On your next call, a Tactiq window will appear where you’ll see the real-time transcription. 

Since Tactiq also has an AI meeting note-taking feature, you can let it automatically highlight important sentences. But the coolest and most time-saving feature is its GPT-3 integration. 

You’ll be able to summarize the meeting in a few sentences, generate the action items with the person's name, and the agendas for the next meeting all in one click. 

As a freelancer, there are weeks that I have plenty of meetings, especially if I have new projects or clients on board. Tactiq easily saves me 3-4 hours per week with its AI meeting note features and GPT-3 integration. It helps me easily assign tasks, organize the next meeting, and create strategy documents without missing anything important. 

Rewrite Emails 

Another time-consuming task for freelancers is managing their inboxes and writing countless emails. According to McKinsey Global Institute,  the average employee spends 28% of their workweek reading and responding to emails. This translates to about 13 hours per week or 650 hours per year.

It’s easy to write emails when you’re delivering positive news. But it can be nerve-wracking to write an email when delivering bad news while remaining professional and kind. And this is where ChatGPT can be a real-life saver.
Here’s how you can rewrite your not-so-nice email: 

1. Write what you want to say without any judgment or filter. 
2. Open ChatGPT and type, “rewrite in a professional yet friendly tone: [your original text].” 
3. And voila! ChatGPT should have a nice little email for you in seconds. 

Here’s what it looks like: 

If you don’t like what ChatGPT spits out, you can just click on “Regenerate response.” Feel free to edit before sending it. Remember that the more details you give, the better the output is! 

This easily saves me 2-3 hours per week. Most times, writing the actual email takes fast. But the anxiety makes it longer because you keep thinking of the best way to write things. 

Repurpose Blog Posts 

As a freelance writer, one of my popular services is turning a live stream or a Zoom session into a blog post. It’s a great way to publish a blog post without starting a topic from scratch.
Oftentimes, you’ll have the transcript of the live stream. Now, most people will publish the transcript without editing it. But this isn’t doing anyone a favor for the following reasons: 

• It’s very hard to read: Most transcripts are more than 10,000 words long. 
• It’s not SEO-friendly: If you want to rank for certain keywords, you’ll need an SEO structure that a transcript doesn’t provide. 
• It includes a lot of fillers: Live streams often include tangents from the original topic. 

How can you use ChatGPT to help you save time? First, make sure to have a clear title and outline. You can use these ChatGPT prompts:

• Identify the main points from this transcript: [transcript]. 
• Rewrite this paragraph into the third person in the third person: [paragraph].
• Write an introduction. 
• Write a conclusion. 

Repurposing a live stream into a blog post used to take me 4-6 hours. Nowadays, it takes me 1-2 hours. 

Plan Content

One of the main ways ChatGPT can assist content managers and freelance writers is by providing a wealth of ideas for new content. Using the model's sophisticated algorithms, users can input keywords or topics and receive an array of potential titles, outlines, and even fully-formed paragraphs to help get the creative juices flowing. 

I’ve used these prompts to help me brainstorm ideas for new content: 

• What are the most popular topics about my [your niche/industry]? 
• Write an outline based on [topic]. 
• What are top-of-the-funnel blog posts to write about [your topic] for [your target audience]?

Here’s what it looks like: 

If you’re writing for SEO, make sure to do your keyword research and prioritize the topics that you want to write about first. 

Write Blog Posts and All Sorts of Content

Once you have planned the topics, you can use ChatGPT to write the content. You can ask ChatGPT to write an outline, paragraphs, introductions, and conclusions. 

But here are a few things to remember when you’re using ChatGPT or any AI tool to write content: 

• Always check your facts: AI will make up facts if it doesn’t have the data. 
• Check for plagiarism: Use Grammarly or Copyscape to check for duplicate content. 
• Never publish without editing: While ChatGPT can produce impressive paragraphs, it still needs to be edited. 

Think of ChatGPT as an assistant. You’re the writer, and you call the shots. Discard what you don’t need. Keep what you like. And always use any AI tool ethically, especially in risky industries like finance and health. 

Focus on What You Do Best

While ChatGPT is not perfect, it is a powerful tool that can help freelancers save valuable time and increase productivity. With its ability to automate tasks such as summarizing meetings, rewriting emails, repurposing blog posts, planning content, and even writing content, ChatGPT can make a freelancer's life easier and more efficient. Freelancers can focus on what they do best while leaving time-consuming tasks to the machine.