As working parents we are so time poor. Since I’ve started managing my own time, it seems to have become even more precious.
When I used to go to an office, I wrote off that time from 8-5pm as office time where I cannot do much else. Now, all the time I have is up to me to manage and I literally want to squeeze everything in.
Freelance projects, kids pickups / drop offs, ‘quality’ time with kids, personal projects, exercise, social interactions, meal planning. It’s a lot.
There must be a way AI can help us
I am compelled to make AI work for me so that I can work better and faster, saving me time and energy to avoid burnout.
Many of you who have been reading my newsletter for a while now know that I have been experimenting with AI tools for almost 2 years now, pre Chat GPT!
There are two dimensions that need optimizing in our lives:
Professional life
Personal life
The lines between them are blurry, however if we tackle one of them, I think it will transcend to both. I’ve started with my professional life.
Using AI in my professional life
I’ve prioritized using AI to optimize my work life to start with. That’s what pays the bills and if I can get it to assist me efficiently, I hope to do more work better and faster. In other words, I hope to find a way to scale my work without burning out or having to hire someone to help me.
This is the reason I’m building The AI Content Co, which is a resource for PR & communications professionals, journalists and content writers to get moving on their use of generative AI.
The truth is, there is no one way to do it. There is no ‘magic’ tool, you just need to pick something you want to use AI for and then find a tool that can do it for you. Then you need to play with the tool to see if you like it!
This can be overwhelming to say the least because you need to kiss many frog tools before you find your prince tool.
I get sent information on hundred’s of AI tools, every day. I’m a bit nerdy about them so I don’t mind ‘kissing many frogs’ before I find the right tool, however it can cause a paralysis of sorts; which frog do you start with? Add to that, you need to pay for many of them before you can determine if they are any good.
The AI Content Co hopes to be a filter and reduce the overwhelm for communications professionals and journalists, so we can focus on getting started using AI tools right away. If this interests you, do sign up for the AI Content Co newsletter on the website, so that you can get notified when new content goes up.
Using AI in my personal life
Since I have started working from home, I also need to optimize my personal life along side my personal projects, and how to do that is a bit on the back burner.
However, I have started using the PARA method to organise my digital life in Notion. And, I’m playing with the AI tool Sanebox to see if it can reduce the overwhelm of the 400 emails I get everyday across 4 email addresses (!)
Not AI but I use Hello Chef for meals, so a huge chunk of meal prep time is taken off me, I’d say about 3 hours a week between planning the dishes and ordering the ingredients. The dishes I pick are 20 minutes to cook or straight in the oven, so that’s all the time spent per day on meals.
If you want to use AI instead, you can get Chat GPT to do your meal prep. I write about it here if you want to try it out!
You just have to play with AI to optimize
If you want to use AI to do anything, bottom line is, you need to carve out the time to play with it to understand its potential so that you can see how it can fit into your life. There is no other way.
For example, in trying to get a passive income stream up and running, I’ve been publishing low content books on KDP (more on that another time!). It used to take me about 3-4 hours to create and publish a book; now takes me about 30 minutes, because I’m using AI! So cool.
Accelerate your AI learning: Quick session with me?
I’m thinking about running a workshop later this month for those interested in accelerating their learning of AI by putting it into action and seeing a quick result.
The idea is to see how you can achieve the unimaginable with AI in 1 hour - no prior skills required. If you understand this, you will quickly be able to apply it to your life, be it personal or professional.
I will send you some details on what exactly the workshop will be on tomorrow and if enough people are interested, I will do the workshop!
Quick vote? Would you be interested in a 1 hour AI learning session with me?
More details tomorrow on exactly what we will achieve in the workshop, but an initial yay or nay would be great!
On that note, I will leave you with this quote:
“Anyone who stops learning is old, at 20 or 80. Anyone who keeps learning stays young.” - Henry Ford
All for now,
Love,
Abha x
Hi Abha, great post. I definitely feel like I need to utilise AI more in both my personal and professional lives. I couldn't make a workshop this month as I'm currently looking after my newborn full time, but if you run another in the next few months then I'd love to join. Take care, Jan x