AI and Efficiency: How I Used ChatGPT to Automate Tedious Tasks

[Impulse]

I’ve been meaning to write a guide like this for a while. There are a lot of ways AI can improve day-to-day work, but I’ve seen plenty of people try it once, expect it to do everything for them, and then write it off as useless when they don’t get what they wanted out of it. This is a guide for those people, along with anyone else who wants to make repetitive, annoying work go faster using AI.

In my previous job, I was stuck in a support role with a heavy workload and basically no backup. Then new management came in and added a pile of tedious processes in the name of ‘efficiency’, which only made everything slower and more frustrating. They also tried introducing various systems to track the work that everyone was doing, but it was incredibly inaccurate. So, on top of having to work with these new processes, I also needed to figure out how to game everything so I could look good enough to pass whatever arbitrary standard they were using.

I needed a way to get things done without losing my mind, and that’s where AI came in.

Once I started using ChatGPT, the difference was immediate. I had been stuck doing more work than ever at a lower standard, and AI helped flip that around. It cut down on repetitive tasks, helped me communicate clearly with difficult people, made complex jobs easier to manage, and kept my writing consistent and professional. Even when I wasn’t feeling particularly professional myself.

In this guide, I’ll break down the ways I used AI to work faster and smarter, and hopefully give you a few ideas on how it can help you do the same.

Disclaimer: I had access to the premium version of ChatGPT, which definitely improves the quality of responses. That said, everything in this article can still apply to the free version or other decent AI tools, so you don’t need to spend money to make it work.

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1. Common Tasks AI Can Handle​

The real key to using AI well is knowing what to hand off to it. You won’t be able to replace your entire job, but you can figure out which parts of your work are dull enough to outsource without causing problems. That’s where it shines: boring, repetitive stuff you’d rather not waste energy on. Things like answering the same basic question ten times in a day, summarising a long block of text, or cleaning up messy notes.

Even if the output isn’t perfect, getting a rough draft or basic structure from AI can save you a lot of time, and you can always tweak the result if it needs polish.

Here are a few examples of tasks that are easy to speed up with AI:

1. Content creation (guides, FAQs, documentation)
   Obvious, but worth including. This is one of the most common uses for AI, and with good reason. The key is to avoid lazy prompts. If you give it vague instructions, you’ll get vague content. You’ll get better results if you provide clear goals, structure, and context (more on that in the next section).
   
   
2. Professional communication (with employers, work colleagues or clients)
   Have you ever had to respond to someone professionally but don’t know how to get the tone right? ChatGPT’s writing style tends to be very appealing to people that are more corporate or formal. It’s also useful if you’re trying to explain something without sounding overly blunt.
   
   
3. Preparing daily task summaries and updates
   Sometimes, you may be asked to provide summaries of the work you have done over a period of time. If you have had the misfortune of needing to do this tedious task, you can ask an AI bot to write this up for you. You just need to provide a very rough draft of the kind of work you do and ask it to fill in the blanks as best as it can.
   
   
4. Text extraction (OCR alternative)
   I haven’t seen much discussion about this, but AI tools like ChatGPT can work as an alternative to traditional OCR software by extracting text from images. Instead of installing a separate program just to copy text out of an image, you can use AI to handle the whole process. Just upload a screenshot, and it can pull out the text, clean it up, and even summarise or rephrase it for you.
   
   
5. Improved search queries
   AI is also useful for figuring out how to search for something when you’re not sure what keywords to use. It can answer questions directly, rephrase what you’re looking for, or help break down more complex topics. There are a lot of AI tools now that have browsing capabilities and can even search the web for you and summarise results.

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2. How I Used AI​

Now that I’ve covered general use cases, here are some of the specific ways I used ChatGPT in my day-to-day work. Most of my job role was within the realms of customer support, so if you’re in a similar line of work, you’ll probably find these examples useful.

Support Ticket Responses​

A big chunk of my time was spent responding to support tickets from users.

The most obvious use case for using ChatGPT in the support desk was for writing responses. It was great for responding to tickets from members and giving them answers that were detailed, professional, and polite – especially when I didn’t have the patience for it myself.

And I wasn’t the only one doing this either. A few other support staff were clearly using ChatGPT too. Funnily enough, our manager clearly had no idea, which kind of proves how easy it is to get away with using AI when the people above you don’t really understand the tech.

I also used it to create canned responses for some of our more common questions and queries. I’ll go into more detail on how I prompted it later, but the short version is: I gave ChatGPT the tone I wanted, the kind of result I was aiming for, and let it figure out the phrasing.

Marketplace Moderation​

Alongside support, I handled marketplace moderation: reviewing sales thread content, processing thread edit requests, and sending invoices.

I found that I could use ChatGPT to speed up certain marketplace processes; Namely the thread edit process, which would involve tediously checking the two sales threads to see what was changed and whether or not I would be required to charge them extra for changing too much. I was able to provide ChatGPT with the thread editing guidelines to remember, and then I could compare the two different sales copies to summarise the changes that were made. This worked especially well with text-based sales threads, but could even be done with image-based sales copies too (although it’s a lot more limited with images).

The added benefit of using AI to analyse the changes was that it also meant I could quickly copy and paste the summary to sellers who wanted to know what had changed and why they were being charged extra.

Internal Team Communication​

Communication between team members at the old forum was… not great. There were issues with conflicting orders, goalpost-shifting and team members spending a lot of their time going through the work that was done by others to look for any mistakes. In a hostile work environment like this, what was the best way I found to talk to others without invoking their ire? AI.

I noticed people were far more receptive to my messages when they were written by ChatGPT. Turns out, it’s very good at writing in a way that’s hard to misinterpret, which is especially useful when dealing with people who aren’t exactly known for their reading comprehension skills.

Content Creation and Editing​

I also wrote support content to keep things running smoothly. This included seller guides, canned responses, and internal docs which all existed to make sure the work team weren’t all saying different things.

For dry or low-effort content, like policy threads or announcements, ChatGPT did most of the heavy lifting. I’d give it the general idea and tone, let it generate a draft, and then do a quick pass to make it less bland and more human. It saved time, lowered my mental load, and let me knock out boring writing tasks without sacrificing quality.

I also used it to review content I had written myself – especially when I wanted to tweak phrasing or shift the tone depending on who I was talking to.

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3. Writing Good Prompts​

Anyone who uses AI regularly will tell you that prompting is everything. It’s not exactly a groundbreaking insight, but it’s true. It can be hard to pinpoint exactly what makes a prompt good, but here’s what I’ve learned works best:

Don’t worry about your writing​

Yeah, I know it sounds stupid for me to say “my tip for writing good prompts is to not worry about how good your writing is” but just bear with me. ChatGPT is pretty good at deciphering typos, awkward phrasing, and walls of text. If you’ve got a bunch of rough thoughts, don’t even think too much about it – just throw them in and let the AI tool do the cleanup.

Clearly define your goal​

Be clear about the result you want from your prompt. If you want something written for a specific purpose, you should specify what that is. For example, don’t just say, “write a reply.” Say what kind of reply. Is it formal? Blunt? Empathetic? Is it for a customer, a coworker, or someone you’re mildly annoyed at? A lot of AI responses default to being overly polite and vague unless you steer it in the right direction.

Give it the context it needs​

If you’re dealing with something complicated, feed the bot all the background information. Long ticket history? Drop the relevant parts in. Ongoing team drama? Add a quick summary. And you can just copy and paste anything if it needs to be low effort. AI tools will take any context you give it to provide a more appropriate response for you.

Requesting specific formats or styles​

Make sure to give more specifications to the AI if you need a specific tone and style. For instance, you can tell it that you want to sound less formal. If you need a certain writing style or language setting (like UK or Australian English), just tell it. You can even ask it to avoid formatting you don’t want, like bullet points, which tend to be an instant ‘this-was-written-by-AI’ giveaway.

Use follow-up prompts to refine responses​

AI works best when you treat it like a tool you’re working with, not just something you throw tasks at. One of the most helpful habits I developed was using follow-up prompts to refine responses. If something was too long, too vague, or didn’t have the tone I needed, it was simple to tweak the result with follow-up clarifications. You can try asking for a shorter version, a more professional rewrite, or a more direct answer.

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4. Avoiding Common Pitfalls​

AI is useful…. sometimes a little too useful. Which makes it easy to become lazy with it, and that’s when you stop getting good results. Whether it’s blindly trusting the output or just sounding like a tech demo instead of a human, these are the mistakes I’ve seen (and made) that are worth avoiding.

Over-relying on AI without fact-checking​

AI will give you clean, professional-sounding nonsense if you’re not paying attention. Even if you’ve given it a lot of information, there’s always a chance it can write something in error or simply misinterpret something that you thought was clear. A good practice is to always verify anything factual, especially if it’s going to be published or sent to someone like a client.

Not giving it enough context to work with​

Giving it vague instructions will only get you vague output. If you don’t explain what you’re trying to do or who it’s for, you’ll get something generic, half-baked, or just completely wrong. A few extra seconds of context in your prompt saves way more time than trying to fix bad output later.

Letting the tone go completely off the rails​

Tone is one of the easiest ways that AI-generated content can mess up, and it usually misses the mark unless you’re clear about what you want. It can take some fine-tuning and figuring out what descriptors get the exact vibe that you are going for.

Also, try to avoid telling AI to write “in a casual tone”. I tried that when I first started out with ChatGPT and what I got was writing that sounded like this:

Sounding like an AI wrote it​

If your content reads like it came straight out of a chatbot, people will notice, and they won’t take you seriously. You don’t need to rewrite everything, but keep in mind which aspects of AI content are dead giveaways to people, and try to edit out those dead giveaways: overuse of bullet points, unnatural emoji use, and way too many em dashes.

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Thank you for reading all of this. I hope this will help some people see how they could improve their work and get AI to do the menial work that we all hate doing.

AI isn’t going to do your job for you, but it can make your job suck a little less. Whether you’re stuck writing policy threads no one reads or having to explain the same thing for the tenth time in one day, AI tools like ChatGPT can save you time, energy, and brainpower.

If you are reading this and have used AI to improve your work in any way, please feel free to leave a comment and share what you’ve done. I’d love to see what tricks other people have found, and it might help someone else find a smarter way to use it too.

Originally written for Sycosure.com​

 

[Zwielicht]

This is a great article, but I am a little biased.

what was the best way I found to talk to others without invoking their ire? AI.

AI was also a great way to avoid accidentally using ableist language that would invoke their ire!

That might just be my favourite trophy here.

Gaining Her Ire
In the "What Are You Here To Do?" field you said "Use ableist language". - "The quickest way to gain my ire is to use unnecessary and ableist language"