Transcription
Hey friends, welcome to the very first episode of Everyday AI, a new series where I'm documenting how I'm personally experimenting with various AI tools to boost my productivity, achieve my goals, and just generally make life a little bit easier.
In this video, I'm going to do a general rundown of how I am personally using AI every day to save at least like 10 plus hours a week. I'm going to be honest: if you are already an expert in using AI and you already know how to do the fancy stuff, and you're already deep in the AI rabbit hole, I don't think this video is going to be particularly helpful for you. But if you're a relative beginner to the AI stuff and you are not using AI absolutely every hour of every day in your job, I'm hoping that something in this video might spark an idea that helps you refine your own approach to AI.
Final thing to say before we dive in: my life as an entrepreneur, writer, and YouTuber may not mirror yours exactly. But the ways that I've always found most helpful when learning any kind of tools, but in particular AI tools, is what I call cross-context learning—basically just looking over the shoulder of someone else who's in a different industry and seeing how they use AI and then being able to apply it to my own context. And so I'm hoping that by showing you exactly what my process looks like, you'll be able to cross-context apply the stuff into your own work and your own life.
Use case number one: how I use AI to augment my writing every day. All right, so there's a couple of AI tools that I string together whenever I need to write anything. So in my case, I need to write my email newsletter, I need to write internal memos for the team; all of my YouTube videos are downstream of writing; all of our social media posts are downstream of writing. Now, broadly, I have a three-step process for writing anything: step one is that I speak into an app called Voice Pal that I have built with my team; secondly, the stuff from Voice Pal then goes into either ChatGPT or Claude by Anthropic; and then phase three is that it usually goes from ChatGPT or Claude straight into Notion where I make any final edits that I need to do before the thing is able to be sent.
So today I need to write my email newsletter, and this is the process that I'm going through. I start off by opening Voice Pal, and as you can see, I've been using Voice Pal for a very, very, very, very long time, since the 9th of December 2023 when we first started building the app. Now at this point, I can hit record or I can hit type; type is what I would do if I just want to capture a thought to come back to later. But in this context, I'm going to record. Okay, so I want to do my email newsletter this week about—I want to do it about a technique that I've recently been thinking about for beating procrastination, and that technique is to go through the motions. In the context of filming YouTube videos, I procrastinate a lot from hitting the record button for filming YouTube videos because there's all these like emotional and cognitive barriers that get in the way around like, "Oh, is this video going to be valuable? Is it good enough?" etc., etc. But I found that going through the motions—i.e., just like doing my hair and putting on my hoodie and getting the camera angle sorted—essentially sort of setting myself up for success on the thing makes the step, the next step of getting started with the task, way easier. So it's like a very slow onramp. All right, so that was phase one. I start off by rambling whatever I've got off the top of my head into the thing. Normally I don't actually do this sitting on my desk; normally I will put in my AirPods, go for a walk, and then like do the stuff then, and that tends to be how I create the bulk of my content through like emails and stuff.
Then the really cool thing is that Voice Pal is asking me sensible follow-up questions. So it's asking, "What specific emotional or cognitive barriers do you face when procrastinating on tasks? Can you share any personal anecdotes or stories to illustrate the effectiveness going through the emotions? How do you think this technique of going through the motions can be applied to other common procrastination scenarios?" I can also click on this button, and it will ask me even more sensible follow-up questions. For example, "How do you measure the success of this technique in overcoming procrastination?" It's a good question. "What are some variations of this technique that could work for different types of tasks? How can this technique be adapted for group settings or collaborative projects?" And then I can click any of these, and then it will start recording for that particular one. "Can you share any personal anecdotes or stories that illustrate the effectiveness of going through the motions?" Yes, I can actually. Um, so until I just started telling myself, "You know what? I'm just going to go through the motions." Great. So that is going to upload, and then you can see it's added the—it's added what I've just said to the stream, and now it's asking me even more follow-up questions based on this: "How do you think the concept of going through the motions can be applied to different areas of life beyond exercise and content creation?"
One of my philosophies on using AI tools is that the goal is not to get the AI to write the stuff, because like, what's the point, right? Like, what's the point? I could—I could go and Claude or Chad or whatever, and I could say, "Hey, just write a newsletter for me." It sort of defeats the purpose, right? The purpose is for this to be a personal newsletter where I'm sharing what are genuinely my own thoughts. And so the reason I'm using AI to augment this is to help me pull stuff out of myself rather than to do the work for me. The kernel and the seed of the idea is coming from me, myself, and I'm only using the AI in a way to augment that. All right, do one more. "What specific emotional or cognitive barriers do you face when trying to start a task, and how do you think going through the motions can help address them?" Uh, for me personally… Okay, fantastic. So now we have created a stream out of these four thoughts. If I wanted to, I could now press the export button, and I could create a draft of Life Notes. So let's see what this looks like straight up. This is actually using uh Claude 3.5 behind the scenes to do the writing. Uh, I don't like this either. Okay, so generally if I don't like the output, what I will do is I will hit copy to clipboard, and now I can go on Claude, which is my favorite app for writing stuff. I have created a project for—where is it?—for Life Notes, and then I can go on Claude and say, "Let's turn this into an issue of Life Notes," and let's see what Claude does. Uh, eh, yeah, no, don't like it. It's—oh, it's—it's—it's really over-indexing on like one format of newsletter that I once wrote. H, okay, go away. Don't really like it. All right, let's try ChatGPT. I have a Life Notes project in ChatGPT. Boom. You know what? Actually, this is pretty good. Um, so what I find useful is I almost always use both Claude and ChatGPT and give them basically the same prompt. Claude, I have found to be, for the most part, 80% of the time, just better at writing. But the nice thing about ChatGPT is that ChatGPT has the memory function, so it actually knows a lot more about me than Claude does. And so maybe like 20% of the time, ChatGPT will just give me a better first draft compared to the thing that I've created with Claude. Cool. So what I will do—I feel like this is good enough for a first draft—I'm now just going to open up Notion, paste it into Notion. So now I've got the thing, and now I'm going to do my own edits on this because, for example, I don't really want the subheadings.
There is one other thing I often try, which is that with Voice Pal, what I can do is I can go into each stream, and I can show the original transcript. So this has all of the ums and ahs and all of that kind of stuff. But then I can copy that stuff into, for example, Claude. You know, actually, this is good. This is pretty good. Let's just bang out the same thing in ChatGPT and just see which one is better. So I'm going to create a new one within this project. Boom. This is also good. I like this; I prefer it compared to this one. Boom. I don't like "Simple but powerful"—eh, it's a bit too—yeah, so okay, so this is actually not bad now. Um, this is what the process looks like most of the time. So we're starting off with the transcript and stuff from Voice Pal, either exporting a draft straight into Notion from Voice Pal, although usually I tend to use ChatGPT or Claude as like an interim to be able to sort of like have a bit of a conversation with it back and forth. And then you can see when it goes into Notion, there's actually quite a few edits that I've made—that I've made to the whole thing.
One mistake I've often seen people make with AI tools is that they sort of think that the output is just going to be amazing straight up. But you saw like, in—in this example, I did like four or five different outputs, a few with Claude, a few with—Claude project, if you would—ChatGPT, ChatGPT project, even Voice Pal directly. And for all of them, I was like, "Eh, eh," like, it's fine, but it's not perfect. It's—and sort of by doing these outputs a few different times, you come to one that's like 80% good, and then I shove it into Notion or whatever text editor of choice, and then I go through and make the edits, and it's just this back-and-forth process. I've seen a lot of people think that like, "Oh my God, AI can just help me with—with my writing," and they expect the process to take 5 seconds. It usually doesn't take 5 seconds. Previously, writing my newsletter would take me about 2 hours 'cause I'd be typing everything up. Now it takes more like half an hour because I start off by speaking, and then like, with Voice Pal, like throughout the week, I can just sort of send in thoughts, and then, you know, usually by the time I get to writing my newsletter, I've got at least some thoughts of stuff that I was capturing throughout the week, and then it becomes a lot easier to make it happen.
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So at this point, we have this in our newsletter. Um, as part of my newsletter, I also have a section of my favorite things this week. I tend not to use AI for that; um, I tend to just write them. So, for example, I would write something like, you know, sometimes you just write something like this, and like AI can't write like this. If I must say, this is—this a good writing? Well, it's not really good writing, but it's—it's very, very me. It was quite fun; it was quite fun writing this little—little paragraph fanboying about this um Tim Ferriss, Brandon Sanderson podcast interview. Um, sometimes, even—even though we're in the world of AI and—and even though I showed an example of like, you know, how I used Voice Pal and Claude and stuff to write this newsletter, sometimes I have a clearer vision of what I want to say, then typing it myself helps me kind of express myself in—in this sort of way. If I tried explaining this to ChatGPT or to Voice Pal or to Claude or whatever, it would have—it would have lost them. With a color—like this is—this is colorful, and sometimes we just go for color; we don't go for like, I don't know, clarity of writing or whatever.
The other thing that I use, which I find AI very helpful for, is Notion AI, because I can just do Command J and I can say, "Suggest 10 subject lines for this email," and let's see what it suggests. Oh, okay, "How I trick my brain into being more productive." You know what? Let's go for that one. Why not? That's easy. Uh, FB six: the—how I—TI my—being more productive. Great. If I didn't have Notion AI, copy that, go into Claude and say, "Uh, generate uh 20 subject lines for this email, please." Oh, it's got "How I TR my brain to being productive." So I find this sort of thing quite helpful, just like copying and pasting stuff into Claude or ChatGPT and then being able to just riff on that. Okay, so that was a lot of how we use AI for writing. Again, there's like tons and tons of stuff. I—I've been doing this for years now with Claude, with ChatGPT. So if this is interesting, I would love to hear in the comments uh what is like—what more would you like to see? We do this a lot; we use AI for pretty much every aspect of our team's workflow and my personal life, but I would love to know what you guys find helpful, 'cause so then we can make more videos in—in the series.
So another major use case that we use AI for is for any sort of data analysis. So anytime there is a CSV or—yeah, any kind of spreadsheet, I'm like, "Glorious! I can just give it to ChatGPT and/or Claude and get it to analyze it." So, for example, I can go into advanced mode for our YouTube analytics, like of the last 365 days of content, and I can download a CSV file. Great. I'm just going to grab this—where is it?—table data, shove it into Claude and say, "This is analytics data from my YouTube channel. I want you to analyze it and, based on the data, suggest the next 10 videos I could make if I wanted to maximize views and subscriber growth." Let's see what it comes up with. So we've got "The Science of Habit Formation: Evidence-Based Strategies That Actually Work." Okay. "Seven High-Income Skills That Will Be Valuable in 2026." Okay. Probably "25 How to Build Wealth in Your 20s: A Step-by-Step Guide." Oh, that's good; that will do well. "The Psychology of Focus: How to 10x Your Concentration." Oh, that's a good title. "Student Side Hustles That Actually Make Money in 2025 With Proof." Okay. "How to Learn Any New Skill Faster: The Science of Rapid Learning." Yep, good video. "Five Common Money Mistakes Students Make and How to Avoid Them." Yeah, easy. "Evidence-Based Time Management: How Top…" Yep, nice. "How to Turn Your Skills Into a Six-Figure Business." "The Science of Motivation: Why Most People Fail to Reach Their Goals." Actually, these are all pretty good. "Your Top-Performing Videos Average Around 35 Minutes. Wow. Aim for 30- to 40-Minute Videos." Fair enough. Okay, here is a prompt that I quite like: "You've given me a level-one response. I want you to go deeper and give me a level-two and level-three response." That's always a little fun thing to try with pretty much any prompt. Okay, interesting. Level three: micro-optimization—oh, title structure matrix. This is interesting. Oh, that's a nice video. "How to Make Your First $100,000 in 2025." "Five Skills to Make You Rich in 2025." "The Science of Success." Eh. "How to Build a Six-Figure Side Hustle." Yep, that's nice. "Evidence-Based Study Method." Actually, yep, that's nice. "How to Build Wealth While Studying." Yep, that's nice. "Will You Stay Poor in 2026? The Ultimate Guide to Financial Freedom." Okay, interesting. "Five High-Income Skills to Learn Before 2026." Yep, that's nice. "How to Actually Achieve Your Goals: Science-Based…" Yeah, we've already done that.
So a couple of weeks ago, me and my wife went to uh Taiwan for a—our like babymoon, which is apparently the final holiday you go on before you have a baby, 'cause we've got a baby in a few months. And so while we were in Taiwan, I was actually using Claude as my personal tour guide. So this was kind of how it went—how—how it went: "I am currently in um this big square in Taipei in Taiwan, and there is this absolutely—there's these two identical-looking, absolutely enormous buildings on either side of the square. Uh, where am I and can—and what can you tell me about it?" "It sounds like you're in Liberty Square, formerly known as Chang—Chang Kai-shek Square." Yep, that was it. "The National Theater, National Concert Hall." Nice. That's interesting. "Help me understand the whole like semiconductor thing—like how did—how did Taiwan become like the home of semiconductors?" "Oh, that's a fascinating story that combines strategic planning, education, and timing. Here's how Taiwan became the semiconductor powerhouse…" Story begins in the 1970s… "Why is creating semiconductors so difficult, and why—how on Earth can it be the case that this single company controls 90% of the supply of semiconductors? That seems utterly, utterly bizarre considering how important semiconductors are in the world." Okay. "I'm in this temple in Taipei, and there are people who are throwing down these uh what look to be stones um or sticks or something." Yeah, they're picking up sticks, and then they're throwing them onto the floor. "What's going on here?" "Oh, you're seeing people use moon blocks. These are CR…" This was like exactly what me and my wife were doing when we were in—exploring Taiwan. It was like—was like—like Claude was basically our own personal tour guide. Like any question that we had, we were like, you know, just speak directly into it, get a response, and then we were sort of reading it out to each other so that, you know, we—it was like, you know, a very way of like jointly having Claude be our tour guide while we were hanging out in—in Taiwan. Now, ChatGPT also does work as a—as a—as a tour guide, and I do use it for a lot of stuff, but to use ChatGPT as a tour guide… "I am currently in uh Kowloon in Hong Kong. I want you to tell me some interesting things about Kowloon Station." So you hit the tick button, and then you have to press the send button, and so it takes two clicks to be able to speak to it rather than one click. So that was two clicks, right? So you—it transcribes first, and then it—and then you press the button, whereas with Claude, you press the transcription button, and it does it straight away. So just that elimination of friction is why I prefer Claude rather than ChatGPT when I'm doing like this sort of casual search-engine-like—tour guiding as I'm—as I'm going around. ChatGPT does have its um sort of real-time feedback thing, but I don't really like it 'cause it talks too slowly. "Hey, ChatGPT, uh, I'm currently uh thinking of cooking something special for my wife for Valentine's Day. She really likes sushi, but she's currently pregnant, so she's not allowed to eat like raw fish. Can you help me come up with some variant of sushi?" "That's a lovely idea, since Izzy loves sushi but can't have raw fish while pregnant. You can make pregnancy-safe sushi with cooked ingredients, veggies, and creative flavors. Here are some great options…" Cooked and safe seafood sushi: shrimp and… It's not bad; it's just—it just speaks a little bit too slowly. So I generally prefer to interact with these different tools while—where I speak to them, and then they—they give me the response in text, and then we just kind of go back and forth. But purely because of that slight extra friction of like the double click on ChatGPT, that's why I prefer to use Claude. Um, there's also Perplexity that I've been experimenting with for like search-engine-type stuff, but you know, these are some of the ways that I use AI to save lots of time in my work and my life.
All right, this video is getting insanely long, but if you are still here in the video, I hope you have found value from it. Again, please, I would love it if you could leave a comment down below and tell me what you liked about it and what you didn't like about it, so that when I make more videos in this series, uh we can just make them as—as useful as possible. Thank you so much for watching, and I will see you hopefully in the next video. Bye-bye.