Hey friends, welcome back to the channel.
AI tools have been absolutely exploding
onto the market recently,
and there's literally hundreds of them
that people on Twitter are talking about all the time.
And loads of people are saying that these AI tools
are gonna change the world of work
and change the way that we approach work
and productivity and life.
Now, I've been experimenting with a bunch of these tools
as they've been coming out.
And so in this video, we're gonna go over the six tools
that I use every day to augment my productivity.
This video is kindly sponsored by Notion,
but more on them later.
Let's go on to the first tool.
Okay, so the first tool we're gonna talk about
is ChatGPT itself.
Now, ChatGPT is the original AI-powered chatbot
that's created by OpenAI.
And OpenAI has really been the leading force in this space
over the last few months,
because they've released GPT-3 and GPT-3.5,
otherwise known as ChatGPT, and GPT-4 very recently.
So how does it work?
Well, essentially you go on chat.openai.com,
you make an account, it is free.
And now you have access to this ridiculously powerful
AI chatbot that you can ask basically anything to.
And then depending on whether you're on the free
or the paid plan, you have options of default or legacy,
or even GPT-4.
And so you can ask this to do almost anything.
So let's have a look.
Write a funny poem about Ali Abdaal.
Ali Abdaal, oh Ali Abdaal, a YouTuber so tall and spry,
with his love for books and tea, he's a nerd,
there's no deny.
So if you're feeling down and blue
and just need a dose of laughter,
just watch some Ali Abdaal videos
and your day will be much better.
Interesting, it's not bad that it's been able
to come up with that kind of stuff.
You can also ask it to do researchy type things.
And looking at this, all of this is pretty much accurate.
This gives you just a very small glimpse
of what ChatGPT can do.
But now I wanna talk through
what are my own personal actual use cases.
And the main one that I use ChatGPT for
is for idea generation.
And I was working on one of my book chapters.
And so I asked ChatGPT,
I'm looking for interesting scientific case studies
that link the idea of play and dopamine
and novelty and productivity.
Please suggest some options.
And now this is pretty good.
The connection between play, dopamine, novelty
and productivity has been explored
in various scientific case studies.
Here are a few interesting ones that you might find relevant.
And it's telling me about the Rat Park experiment,
about Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's
flow state and dopamine research,
about Kent Berridge's research,
about Stuart Brown's research
and about Jane McGonigal's research.
Now at this point,
I was quite familiar with a bunch of these,
but I wasn't really familiar with option number three.
And so I just asked ChatGPT, expand on number three.
And now it's telling me more about this study,
about what happened in rodents
when they injected them with dopamine,
something about rewards.
And at this point I'm thinking,
okay, that's super interesting.
I want to find out more.
I asked what is the DOI of this study?
Now DOI is the digital object identifier.
And it is a basically a URL
that every scientific study has
so that I can click on the URL
and then see if it's actually legit.
And now here's where it gets interesting.
And this shows one of the limitations,
even of this new evolved GPT-4 platform.
So it's saying, I apologise for the confusion.
The thing that I said is not actually a specific study,
but it's a summary of studies,
but it's given me a reference to an actual study
that I can look up.
And so I've now got the reference to the study,
the neural basis of drug craving
and incentive sensitization theory of addiction.
And I'm thinking at this point,
oh, this is not exactly what I was looking for.
So I do a quick Google search.
I find the paper,
I glance through the paper and I realise,
ah, this is not the dream.
ChatGPT did a really good job
of essentially telling me
that this was super interesting research
that was very specifically tied to play,
productivity, dopamine and novelty,
which is what I was looking for.
But the limitation of the language model
is that essentially, long story short,
it just predicts the next word based on the previous word.
And so a lot of the time it will make leaps of logic
or just say things that are straight up not exactly true.
So I tried taking a different tact.
What are some real world stories or case studies
that illustrate the link between play,
productivity, dopamine and variety?
And it's given me a few things like Google's 20% time policy,
the Finnish education system, which I knew about,
and this ludicrous gamification example,
which I didn't know about,
but I know it's not particularly relevant
to what I wanna say.
And now I've asked it for five real world examples
where adding novelty into otherwise mundane work tasks
lead to increase in productivity and enjoyment,
but avoid strategies
that might be described as gamification.
And now this is interesting, themed workdays,
desk swapping, creative brainstorming sessions,
walking meetings, cross-functional projects.
This is kind of interesting.
It's given me a few ideas
for interesting avenues that I wanna explore.
I'm interested in this walking meetings concept.
I know Bruce Daisley talks about it in one of his books,
which is called The Joy of Work.
And I wanna see if there's actually any studies
that show that actually taking meetings
and calls and stuff while walking around
helps you feel more creative and more productive
or does anything to do with dopamine.
But I know that that's a research area
that I'm gonna explore myself.
But one of the major issues with ChatGPT
is that it often is at capacity.
Now I pay for ChatGPT Plus, which is $20 a month.
Totally worth it for me
because I use it quite a lot for this researchy stuff.
So hopefully this has given you a bit of an idea
of how you might use ChatGPT
if you're researching stuff as well,
along with some of the limitations
of trying to use an AI tool exclusively for your research.
And so now let's move on to tool number two.
And tool number two is Notion AI.
Now you guys probably know about Notion.
I've been talking about it for absolutely years,
I think since like 2019.
And so many people that I meet on the streets
tell me that they started using Notion
because of watching various of my videos.
And so we've got so much of our company documentation
and materials and stuff all in Notion.
And I've actually been using it for the last four years now
as the prime hub for my YouTube videos.
But the interesting thing that they've released recently
is Notion AI.
And because we've been using it for so long,
we've got a pretty good relationship
with the guys at Notion.
And so we dropped them an email being like,
hey, we're gonna make a video about these AI tools
mentioning Notion AI.
Would you like to sponsor the video?
And they very kindly said yes.
And so this video is officially sponsored by Notion.
And so you can harness the power of AI
within your Notion pages itself.
So let's start with something basic.
This is a video that I wanna make at some point,
seven techniques for staying organized and productive.
We're gonna just see what does the AI
offer us the option of doing.
So essentially within the Notion workspace,
you just hit the space bar
and now you can access the AI features,
brainstorm ideas, blog post, outline,
social media post, press release,
creative story, essay, loads of other options.
And so I can just give it a prompt.
All right, and let's see what it does.
Here we go.
It's not bad.
Introduction, create a to-do list,
prioritize tasks, use a calendar or planner,
minimize distractions, take breaks,
delegate tasks, stay organized, recap, et cetera, et cetera.
But I don't like the fact that this is a bit basic.
I want it to be a bit more evidence-based
because that's my jam.
Redo, but cite evidence
for each of the main points in the video.
Okay, here we go.
This is getting better.
Create a to-do list where they've got studies
conducted by Harvard Business Review,
Dominican University, calendar planner, take breaks.
Okay, this is all very good.
But the other limitation as we've already talked about
is that sometimes it does make things up.
Redo, but please include a DOI URLs
when you're citing studies.
Let's see what happens.
Okay, so this is pretty good.
This is not bad.
Within about two minutes of work,
we've gotten seven different tips
with a bunch of DOI studies.
Now, the crucial thing is,
let's see if these are actually legit.
A study by the University of Illinois
found that brief breaks can improve focus and productivity.
Okay, cool.
So I'm just gonna Google this.
Boom.
Let's see what happens.
Nothing, absolutely nothing.
And it seems like none of these are actually legit
because I've tried Googling all these DOIs
and I've seen what these studies even are.
And so again, pointing to the limitations of AI,
it's pretty magical.
It's pretty great that it's been able
to create this outline for me,
but now I have to go on the internet
and do the research myself.
Now, there's another thing in particular
that Notion AI is really good for,
and that is summarizing stuff.
And it does a pretty solid job of summarizing things
that are already on the page.
So for example,
thanks to the Readwise integration with Notion,
anything I've ever highlighted on my Kindle
gets automatically imported into my Notion database.
And so you can see that these are a bunch of books
that I've read recently and I've got highlights for.
And earlier, I was working on a video,
a book club episode of The Pathless Path by Paul Millett,
who's a friend of mine.
This is all of my highlights of the book.
This is one of the books
that I've got the most highlights for.
And so I can use the power of Notion AI
to do interesting things with the fact
that I've already got my highlights in here.
So here's what I did.
I copied and pasted these highlights onto a new Notion page,
and I gave Notion AI the prompt,
use the highlights on this page to write an outline
for a three-part video about the book,
The Pathless Path by Paul Millett,
and let's see what happens.
Cool, outline, brief part one, introduction,
part two, finding your path, part three, overcoming burner.
That's pretty good.
That's a pretty reasonable summary
of what the main areas of the book are.
And it's cool,
because it's literally just done that
through my own personal highlights.
So it's not like I've asked it,
give me an outline of the book,
where it will just try and crawl the internet for information.
These are specifically the bits
that I've personally highlighted.
And so adding in that human touch
and then letting the AI augment the human touch,
hopefully leads to better results
than just asking the AI to do its thing.
I wanted some more details,
so I said for each bullet point,
add more detail based on my highlights.
And now it's adding a little bit more detail,
which is kind of nice.
It also does a pretty reasonable job
of making an AI summary of the book.
It calls it a document.
This document discusses the concept of The Pathless Path.
Again, kind of basic.
I already know what the book is about.
But if I was, for example,
writing an article for my website,
and I couldn't be bothered to summarize
the contents of my highlights,
I could just ask the AI to do it,
and then obviously do some manual in-person editing
to make sure it's actually legit.
The other thing I've done is use the highlights below
to create a list of action points.
And this is interesting
because it's basically summarized my highlights
into these bullet points,
which could be interesting as a tweet thread,
but also crucially for me,
like I'm not just gonna copy and paste this
into a tweet thread because it's a bit basic
and I don't wanna do that.
Instead, I'm gonna look at these action points and think,
ooh, what are the interesting ones here
that I wanna expand on?
And so I now zoom out and I think, okay, cool.
I've got some ideas based on the outlining
that Notion AI has done and the summarizing of my highlights.
Let me now actually think from my own brain,
what do I want this video to be about?
And the first thing I wanna talk about in this video
is this idea of the pathless path versus the default path.
And so I've asked it, use the highlights on this page
to write some bullet points describing the key differences
between the pathless path and the default path.
It has very kindly obliged.
And then, and this is a really powerful thing
that Notion does, that ChatGPT does not,
make the above into a table comparing the differences
between the default path and the pathless path.
And this is actually really solid.
It's given me a table in terms of definition,
fulfillment, openness to new possibilities,
metrics for success, for default path, for pathless path.
And this is sick.
This is actually something I might include in my video
and it saves me having to do the faff of, you know,
the fairly boring work of just like copying
and pasting highlights and just writing it out
into the format of a table.
The AI is really good at doing that grunt work
and doing it for me.
And I'm using that to create an outline
just to give my own brain some other ideas.
And then in reality, what I would do is
I create these like little spider diagrammy type things
for the videos that I do,
whether I do or don't use AI to help outline it.
If this Notion AI stuff sounds interesting
and you wanna check it out,
then do please click the link in the video description,
because if you click that link,
then Notion will know that you came to Notion AI
through my link,
and then they might also wanna sponsor future videos,
which would be very nice.
So check it out, add it to your workspace
and see if you like it.
All right, tool number three
that I use to boost my productivity
is a tool called Speechify,
which is an AI text to speech enabled software.
It was initially built for people with dyslexia
who find it difficult to read,
but actually loads of people who don't have dyslexia
also have found it super helpful
as a way of boosting their productivity
when it comes to reading stuff.
And I've actually got an interview with Cliff Weitzman,
who's the founder of Speechify over on my podcast,
Deep Dive, you can check that out if you like.
But Speechify is really good.
And what's interesting about it
is it can essentially read stuff to me.
I can read pretty fast myself,
but I find that sometimes as my attention begins to wander,
I turn on the Speechify read feature
and it just makes it a little bit more fun,
a little bit more interesting.
And I've got like loads and loads and loads of papers here,
loads of PDFs that I need to read or that I've read.
And it just, you know,
it becomes a bit of a drag sometimes.
And so for example, here's a paper,
back to the future with the effect of daily. into the future on happiness and anxiety.
All I have to do is highlight the text.
I hit option Q.
The ability to project oneself into the future
has previously been found to be related
to happiness and anxiety.
The purpose of the present study was to investigate 391 0:10:11,560 --> 0:10:01,440 a practice of mental time travel
the causal effect of deliberate mental time travel.
So this is kind of fun.
I've got this in my task bar.
It's the voice of Mr. President.
All you have to do is select text
and then the AI thingy voice thingy will, you know,
put in the voice of whoever you want
and will read the thing to you.
And then of course you can speed it up and slow it down.
And in fact, I'm gonna change the voice
and there's loads of different voices to choose from.
I quite like Nate.
Do I like Nate?
I do like Nate, yeah.
Research on MTT into the future and wellbeing
must address the issue of whether positive or negative.
People with higher level of being frequently experienced.
Indeed, previous findings on the topic
have only been correlational.
Of course, the most direct and unambiguous way
to determine whether MTT and previous findings
are controversial concerning negative future thinking
I know people don't like it when I speed listen to stuff,
but it's super, super helpful for me.
So if I'm absorbing like a huge ass PDF
that I'm not massively interested in
and I'm trying to find the perfect like bit of it,
I can whack this up to like 900 words per minute
and just sort of like blitz like the content.
And then for the bit that's particularly interesting,
I can actually then read it properly
and highlight it and take notes and do the thing.
If you're interested in checking out Speechify,
there's a link down below
with some sort of discount associated with it.
So you can check that out, see if you like it, if you want.
All right, tool number four
that I use to boost my productivity
is a writing tool called Lex.
Now I've actually been using this since 19th of October, 2022
so it's been about six months now.
But one of the reasons I still enjoy using Lex
is that it's basically Google Docs with AI built in
in a distraction free writing environment.
So for example, here is something I wrote the other day
around YouTube changed my life.
The cool thing about Lex is that its main feature,
which I find useful is auto-complete
to help avoid writer's block.
So for example, these days when I wake up in the morning,
I'm genuinely excited to get started with work.
It's a few ways to call it that, blah, blah, blah.
And I'm thinking, okay, I wanna write more stuff.
So I've written, so what's the takeaway here?
Why am I sharing this at all?
Well, three main things.
And now I'm gonna use auto-complete
and hopefully it's gonna say,
firstly, it's totally possible to transition
out of a traditional job field into something else.
It's daunting, sure, and will require a lot of hard work,
but it can be done.
Secondly, don't be afraid to pivot.
I thought I wanted to specialize in emergency medicine
and work in a hospital,
but then I followed the things
that were actually making me happy.
And it turns out that the hospital
wasn't necessarily the best option.
Lastly, follow the things that make you happy.
Don't stay in a job that doesn't make you happy
just because it's what you're supposed to do.
Bit passe towards the end, a bit basic.
But the cool thing about this
is that it has taken my writing style into account.
This is all the stuff that I've already written myself.
So it knows what my writing style is.
And now it's writing in that style.
It's somewhat conversational, it's not too formal.
Let's try and see if there's anything else for this one.
I still miss the hospital environment,
the dynamic between patients and doctors
and the old funny, sad, scary story.
But I found more fulfillment, more satisfaction,
more autonomy in the world of YouTube.
YouTube analytics and professional development.
So here are my few,
honestly, I can't imagine going back to the hospital.
It's not bad, this is actually pretty good.
When I'm writing something and just like,
I'm thinking, oh, I don't know what to say next.
I hit command enter, the AI fills it out.
Usually I end up deleting what the AI has written
and just writing it myself because I've got an idea.
But the key point is that the AI
has helped me overcome the writer's block
and it's given me some ideas
for the thing that I actually want to say.
But to be honest, full disclosure,
Notion AI was not a thing when I first started using this
and you can probably do the stuff in Notion AI as well.
All right, now we come to tool number six and that is Grain.
Grain is a recording device for Zoom calls.
We have been using it for absolutely years.
How long has it been since I've been using Grain?
This is like basically all the Zoom calls
that I've had since June, 2020.
Damn, this is the first live session
for my part-time YouTuber Academy.
Essentially what Grain does is that it,
if you're recording a Zoom call,
it automatically imports into Grain
and then it will create an AI transcription
of the Zoom call if you want.
But also these days it will generate
an AI summary of the Zoom call.
And so what you can do is you've got your Zoom call recording
you've got the AI generated transcript,
you've got a summary, which is super helpful these days.
That's a fairly new feature,
thanks to all the AI tools that are proliferating
on the market these days.
You can label the people.
So this is a call between me and Ines and Rachel
and you can select bits and you can turn them
into a highlight.
So I can create a highlight out of that thing.
I can look at my highlight section
and then I can share a link to this highlight.
And this is nice.
So actual use cases right now,
it's particularly helpful for recording meetings
because then we can share those meeting recordings
and the summaries and the highlights
with people who weren't at the meeting.
But the main reason I actually started using Grain
three years ago when I started working on my book project
was because I wanted to document the entire journey
of writing the book from start to finish.
And so the very first Zoom calls with my editor
where we're talking about the concepts,
Zoom calls that I had with people like James Clear
and other author friends on the internet
have all been recorded on Grain.
It's all there.
And at some point I'm gonna go through all the content,
use the transcripts, use the summaries,
use the highlight stuff
because I've been making highlights as I go along
to turn it into a bit of a personal documentary
on how the book journey has gone.
All right, tool number six is a tool called otter.ai
which is also an AI transcription tool
but it works a bit different to Grain.
It does have the option to record Zoom calls these days
but that's not what we use it for
because initially you just had to upload an MP3
and it would transcribe everything for you.
Now this is super, super helpful
for generating transcripts of our podcasts.
So this massively boosted our team's productivity.
So we just upload the MP3 file of the podcast
once we're done.
And then Amber, our podcast producer
can go through the transcripts
and can essentially pick out interesting clips
that we wanna do for social media.
They've also got an AI generated summary
which is super helpful for putting timestamps
into episodes of our deep dive podcast.
And the other cool thing about otter
is that I can actually use it to record on the go.
And then with a single tap,
it's now recording from my microphone
and it's gonna transcribe in real time
the things that I'm saying.
And that is absolutely sick.
So this is how I take notes from audio books.
I'm just listening to the audio book
of two weeks notice by Amy Porterfield.
It's really good so far.
She just talks about this concept of the journaling prompt
and this sparks some thoughts, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,
I'll kind of say all these things
and I'll trust that the audio has been recorded
and it's available for me and my team to access on the web.
And also it's been transcribed.
And that means if I then want to make a video
about the book, two weeks notice by Amy Porterfield,
which is the one that I did this for most recently.
And I can be like, oh yeah,
these are all the thoughts I had
while I was listening to this book.
And therefore all of these thoughts can be compiled
into some kind of format to go in the video.
Pretty cool stuff, would recommend.
All right, so that was a bit of a walkthrough
on how I'm personally using these six specific
AI themed tools to boost my productivity.
Hopefully you got something in there
that was actually helpful.
If you're interested in more tips on being productive,
check out this video over here,
which is about seven habits that I do every day
that saved me around three hours a day.
Thank you so much for watching
and I'll see you hopefully in the next video.
Bye-bye.