How to use ChatGPT as a Project Manager

As a project manager, efficiency and productivity are top priorities. However, with so many tasks on your plate, it can be challenging to manage your workload. That's where ChatGPT comes in. This AI tool can help streamline many of the time-consuming tasks, from creating meeting summaries and action items to researching complex topics and rewriting status updates. 

Before You Begin: Set Up Your OpenAI account. 

Before you start using ChatGPT, make sure you have an OpenAI account. It’s free to create one. You can start using it the moment you sign up. But sometimes, the server becomes overloaded when too many people use it. 

This is when it’s helpful to have a ChatGPT Plus account, which comes with a separate login link. This way, you can keep using ChatGPT even if the server is at capacity. As of this time, though, it’s not available for all countries yet. You can always sign up for the waitlist.
If you’re still just exploring ChatGPT, taking advantage of the free version is better. 

How Can ChatGPT Help Project Managers? 

As a marketing project manager, most of my time is spent in meetings, research, planning, and documentation. This not only takes so much time, but it also takes a lot of my brain bandwidth. 
Luckily, with the help of ChatGPT, I can speed up some of my workflows and lessen the load from my brain. For example, researching and summarizing can take a couple of hours, especially during the early stages of a project. But collecting data and summarizing them clearly and concisely are ChatGPT’s expertise. What takes me hours will take seconds with AI! 

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Instantly Create Meeting Summaries and Action Items 

As a project manager (or any remote professional, really), you most likely have long, recurring meetings. Depending on your project workload, this can be between 5 to 10 hours per week. This doesn’t include the time you spend preparing for the meeting and documenting it after.
Here’s how I use ChatGPT to help me save time for any type of meeting:

1. Make sure that I record the call and generate a full transcript file. 
2. Copy and paste the transcript on ChatGPT. 
3. Extract the summaries and action items.

Reading the transcript manually and taking the most important stuff out usually takes me 30 minutes. But with ChatGPT, this takes 30 seconds or less.  Read how to use ChatGPT with Zoom or Google Meet transcripts for a step-by-step guide. 

ChatGPT works great, but as you can see, manual work is still involved: copying and pasting the transcript and using prompts to extract what you want.
The easiest and fastest way to do this is using Tactiq. Tactiq is a real-time transcription tool for Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet. But the most amazing thing is that GPT3 (ChatGPT’s under-the-hood technology) is integrated within Tactiq. This means that you can instantly generate summaries, action items, and agendas.
Here’s how to try Tactiq:

1. Install Tactiq for free on Google Chrome. 
2. Connect Zoom, Google Meet, or Teams under Integrations. 
3. Join your call as usual. 
4. After the call, you’ll get an email with a link to your transcript. 

Once you have the transcript, click “Generate AI Summary.” 

And voila! You’ll have an easy-to-read and highly accurate summary. You can also generate the action items with the names of the attendees. 

And if you need to plan another meeting, Tactiq suggests the next agenda items. You can easily delete the ones that you don’t need. 

This method is perfect for calls like…

• 1-1 meetings 
• Kickoff calls
• Planning calls 
• Daily standups 

…and more. Once you have the transcript, you can turn it into other content using ChatGPT. For example, you can turn it into a planning document or to kickstart your research. 

Speed Up Brainstorming and Research Process 

Another time-consuming task for project managers is brainstorming and research. Depending on the project's scope, it can take anywhere from 30 minutes to 3 hours. For example, planning a content calendar for 3 months takes me a few days. 

Here’s how I use ChatGPT for brainstorming and research: 

1. I set a specific goal for each session. 
2. I ask questions based on the goal. 
3. I use initial responses to do more research. 

For example, my recent marketing project involves figuring out the main target audience to focus on. The client wants to focus on high-income cities closer to her time zone.
So, I asked ChatGPT to list the top cities that need life coaching that are closer to the Denmark time zone. Here’s the response:

As you can see, it provided a really specific answer based on what I needed. It also narrows down the cities that I need to research more. 

Help Create and Document Procedures 

Creating and documenting procedures is critical to ensuring a project's success. However, the process can be time-consuming and overwhelming, especially when managing multiple projects simultaneously. This is where ChatGPT comes in handy.

It can:

• Streamline procedure creation with the suggested format, tone, structure, templates, and examples.
• Ensure consistency in procedure format and tone.
• Simplify language for better understanding.

Creating procedures works great if you already have the initial content. For instance, in one project I’m working on, we are turning a live stream transcript into a blog post. I created a procedure that takes 30 minutes. Done manually, it takes more than 3 hours!
Here’s one of the prompts I’ve used: 

Using ChatGPT can help speed up the process of writing down procedures. Sometimes, all you need are bullet points of your ideas. ChatGPT will do the rest of the writing.

Rewrite Status Updates 

Lastly, project managers spend their time updating stakeholders on the status of the projects. Writing updates from scratch can be nerve-wracking. Or you end up writing a very long update! 

Status updates need to be clear and precise. 

With ChatGPT, you can:

• Ask it to rewrite a long update into short snippets. 
• Write the updates in a different tone or writing style. 
• Summarize a long report and turn it into a short status update. 

You can pretty much rewrite anything you want, from emails to social media posts to user stories. 

ChatGPT Use Cases are Limitless

These workflows can give you more ideas for your own use cases and workflows as a project manager. While you can accomplish anything in ChatGPT, you can always rely on tools like Tactiq with a built-in ChatGPT integration. With these tools, you can simplify, streamline, and speed up workflows. This way, you can focus on high-level tasks and free up more time in your work day.