10 ChatGPT Productivity Hacks to Boost Efficiency and Save Time

From task management apps to CRM systems, productivity tools are a fixture of the modern workplace. But with the emergence of artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT, we’re entering a new era of “work smarter, not harder.” Since its launch in November 2022, ChatGPT has evolved from a knowledge resource to a tool that lets you write, code, research, and ideate. Instead of asking simple questions to get an answer, you can rely on it to help perform specific work tasks, act as a virtual colleague, and boost overall productivity.

According to DigitalOcean’s Currents Report, 56% of respondents indicated that their company is currently exploring or using AI/ML tools, and 45% of respondents believe these technologies make their jobs easier. While these tools are gaining traction, just 27% of companies have established policies on using ChatGPT and generative AI in the workplace. This gap suggests more companies would benefit from creating guidelines to address both ethical and practical aspects of AI, enabling more responsible and productive implementation.

This article examines ChatGPT, its benefits and challenges, and tips on how your team can use it to boost workplace productivity.

DigitalOcean’s GenAI Platform offers businesses a fully managed service to build and deploy custom AI agents. With access to leading models from Meta, Mistral AI, OpenAI, and Anthropic, along with essential features like RAG workflows and guardrails, the platform makes it easier than ever to integrate powerful AI capabilities into your applications.

What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence model designed to respond to user prompts conversationally. It can respond to questions, generate responses, and create a range of content, including code snippets, essays, social media posts, and emails. ChatGPT is an example of conversational AI, which is designed to mimic human conversations and interactions. It combines machine learning and natural language processing to formulate and generate a response.

Developed by OpenAI, ChatGPT uses deep learning and its generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) set of algorithms to digest information and respond to user input. As a form of generative AI, ChatGPT uses its GPT large language model (LLM) and human feedback to improve and train responses over time.

ChatGPT prompt engineering

Effective prompts are essential to using ChatGPT to get the right outputs. Though the technology is human-like, can improve over time, and responds in a conversational tone, you must know how to formulate your questions. The ideal ChatGPT prompt is specific, includes necessary context, and has examples.

You can ensure they get their intended responses with the following prompt engineering best practices:

• Write specific instructions. Use prompts to set the parameters of your output, for example, specifying tone (educational vs conversational), format (bullet points, table, paragraphs), or length (short and concise, long and detailed). It is not a mind reader, so it is more beneficial to be as specific as possible.
• Attach a reference text. Having a reference text, such as a meeting transcript, PDF, a spreadsheet, a resume, or a copied passage, will inform ChatGPT about the type of response it should generate.
• Set constraints. Telling ChatGPT what to exclude is just as helpful as telling it what to include. This ensures a more useful response.
• Split large tasks into smaller subtasks. ChatGPT generates its best responses when it can work on one task at a time and can get feedback on that one specific task.
• Give the model time to think. ChatGPT might skip over information or have reasoning errors when trying to generate a response as fast as possible.
• Use integrations. For specific tasks, it might be more useful to use additional integrated tools—such as a text retrieval system or a code execution engine—to provide outside knowledge or increase response accuracy.

Benefits of ChatGPT for productivity

ChatGPT is a helpful productivity tool for individuals and businesses alike. It can bring specific benefits such as:

• Efficiency. ChatGPT and connected applications can process repetitive tasks, which allows you to focus on more complex tasks.
• Increased content quality. ChatGPT can provide content feedback, check for grammar and spelling, and remember style guide preferences.
• Personalization. With ChatGPT Pro, you can tailor responses to your personal preferences or specific information using custom instructions. Set preferences allow you to add details about response types, information about yourself, and values to integrate into responses.
• Response time. ChatGPT can quickly digest and generate information, which means you can get the answers you need much faster.
• Research. You can query ChatGPT to gain information about complex topics and use it as a learning resource.

Considerations of ChatGPT

Despite widespread adoption for both personal and professional use, ChatGPT does have limitations when it comes to:

• Accuracy. ChatGPT’s training models are based on older, archived versions of the Internet. This means that, depending on the query, it will not have the most up-to-date information. Additionally, it will provide information but not include specific sources or explain where it got the information from. There is also the risk of AI hallucination, in which the system generates false data while creating a response.
• Understanding human language. ChatGPT’s models will provide an output based solely on the words you input. This means that specific responses might seem shallow or not have complete insight into the topic.
• Security. ChatGPT can easily generate code, meaning it can be used to create malicious or harmful code. While OpenAI does not use data submitted by customers by default, be cautious about using ChatGPT with proprietary or company-specific information.
• Plagiarism: Consider risks around plagiarism, intellectual property, and training data bias for ChatGPT usage. This means you should be critical of the responses they receive and be sure to verify any important information.

10 ChatGPT productivity hacks

ChatGPT is useful for writing, coding, idea generation, and task automation. While it is not at the point to fully replace human interaction or knowledge, it can support you with the following tasks and projects:

1. Use the Deep Research feature to conduct market research and generate a report

As a newer feature, Deep Research can investigate specific topics and create a long-form research report of findings. It can synthesize content across the web and collect validated sources to develop a comprehensive document much faster than an individual researcher. While reading, gathering, and validating sources on a specific topic might take hours or days for one person, Deep Research can do it in a matter of minutes. You can ask Deep Research to go in-depth on a specific topic, such as vGPU market trends, technology adoption levels, or how a certain technology works.

2. Attach a document and have ChatGPT summarize the main points

One of the most helpful features of ChatGPT is that you can attach files from your computer, Google Drive, or Microsoft OneDrive. You can add meeting summaries, industry reports, and product messaging guidelines and have ChatGPT summarize the main points of interest. This reduces the amount of time needed to comprehend the document or overall reading time. For the best summaries, specify your ideal format—for example, asking for bullet points organized by priority, time-based recommendations, or summaries that highlight specific competitors or technologies.

3. Use Sora to create marketing graphics and videos

Sora is OpenAI’s video and text generation engine that generates GIFs, images, and looped videos for marketing or promotional campaigns. This can help your team create visual content without the need to shoot and edit live video footage, which can normally take days or weeks. A Sora prompt can generate content within a few minutes. You might ask for “a 10-second looping video of a coffee cup with steam rising for an Instagram post about our new breakfast menu” or “a panoramic banner image of mountain scenery with soft morning light for our adventure tourism website header.”

4. Experiment with GPTs (such as DALL-E) to create logos for a product launch or product design

GPTs are customized versions of ChatGPT that can help you with specific use cases. They have additional knowledge than the main GPT model and provide more tailored assistance. For example, there are GPTs for academic research like SciSpace, design work with Canva, and math calculations through Wolfram Alpha. With DALL-E, a GPT built by OpenAI, you can create logo mockups and images based on specific style guidelines or preferences. This can save time if you’re a team working on a logo redesign and want to do some quick prototyping or if you’re a solopreneur looking for a fast app icon to submit with your beta version to the App Store.

5. Use canvas to write and debug code

OpenAI’s canvas is designed to help developers with coding projects and provide more assistance than GPT-4o. This means you can get code snippets for specific tasks and also input their own code to get feedback and discover any potential bugs. This can save developers hours, so they don’t have to generate code manually or spend time rote troubleshooting. Many development teams find they can consolidate their tools with ChatGPT rather than paying for specialized third-party coding assistants on the market.

6. Generate audience analysis for product marketing campaigns

Market research is a time-consuming and expensive process that can take months of planning and execution. To effectively gather data, you and your team must conduct customer outreach, create engaging surveys, perform data analysis, implement user testing and feedback, and generate effective audience messaging. It’s also an extremely collaborative process if you work with an external market research firm to determine customer or end-user engagement around a topic or product use. ChatGPT can help generate a foundational understanding of market segments and audience analysis for product campaigns and launches, including personas to target, their main needs, interests, and messaging guidelines.

7. Conduct product analysis for specific product offerings

Product research, much like market and audience analysis, can take time. It requires you to navigate across multiple documentation sites, user communities, product pages, and talk to industry connections to get the information you’re looking for. It also isn’t a guarantee that you’ll have an apples-to-apples comparison, depending on what information is publicly available. ChatGPT can generate comparison charts for products, along with specific features, within several minutes. This can help you get a sense of market offerings and also allow businesses to understand how their products might compare to other industry offerings. You can ask ChatGPT to compare specific product types, features, and vendors against each other.

8. Perform SEO analysis and gain content feedback

ChatGPT can help writers, developers, and marketers improve their content and make it more search-friendly with search engine optimization (SEO) analysis and content suggestions for keyword usage, linking, readability, meta elements, and technical SEO code. Before drafting an article or landing page, you might ask ChatGPT to analyze your target keywords, suggest semantic variations, and provide content structure recommendations based on top-ranking competitors. You can then have the app review your article for optimal keyword density, suggest internal linking opportunities, and generate meta descriptions that balance SEO requirements with click-through appeal.

9. Automate your workflows with ChatGPT

Every job has tasks that often fall into the category of “necessary but repetitive,” such as writing emails, scheduling meetings, specific types of coding projects, and data collection. You can automate specific tasks and workflows with ChatGPT. The three main ways to achieve this are:

1. Use a software tool. Software tools such as Zapier or Make connect with ChatGPT via API so you can set up protocols that perform certain “if this, then that” (ITTT) workflows.
2. Use the OpenAI API + coding scripts. You can write code in Python, JavaScript, and other code languages to automate workflows.
3. Use plugins or custom GPTs. The paid version of ChatGPT allows you to create tailored workflow assistants with custom GPTs, upload files to process data in bulk, and connect with application plugins. For example, you can use GPTs to create scheduling assistants like the one below.

10. Provide email templates for marketing campaigns or product launches

Email copy creation requires a lot of time to write and review—especially if it’s across different business verticals or end users—as each version needs its own production process. You can ask ChatGPT to write templates or draft emails for specific events, campaigns, or product launches. With additional feedback, you can tailor the copy to have a desired tone, highlight specific details, or address the right audience segment.

References

• Build and Deploy Your Personal Terminal ChatGPT Bot in Python with OpenAI APIs
• How to Use LLM CLI to Deploy the GPT-4o Model on DigitalOcean GPU Droplets
• Building a Custom Real-time Chat Experience with DigitalOcean’s GenAI Platform

ChatGPT productivity FAQs

What are the best ChatGPT productivity hacks?

ChatGPT hacks include summarizing emails and documents, providing presentation feedback, code debugging, and topic brainstorming.

How can ChatGPT save time at work?

ChatGPT saves time at work with workflow automation, research report writing, code creation and debugging, product analysis, market research, video and image generation, brainstorming, SEO analysis, and writing.

How do I optimize my ChatGPT prompts for better results?

For the best ChatGPT responses, prompts should be as specific as possible, include all necessary contextual information, and be limited in their task scope.

Can I integrate ChatGPT with other productivity tools?

Yes. ChatGPT can integrate with other productivity tools via code scripts or connected plug-ins.

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