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How I use AI to save 10+ hours per week

2025-02-14 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 18:26 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Tools, apps and tech · mode: Demonstration and walkthrough · tags: AI, His own products discussed, Sponsor segment present, Family

In the first episode of his Everyday AI series, Ali shows how he uses AI every day: a three-step writing process (speak into VoicePal, draft with ChatGPT or Claude, edit in Notion), data analysis of spreadsheets and YouTube analytics, and Claude as a voice tour guide on holiday.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — The first episode of Everyday AI; cross-context learning

  • ★★ Ali opens Everyday AI, a new series documenting how he personally experiments with AI tools to boost his productivity, achieve his goals and make life a little easier. — 00:00:00
  • ★★ Ali says he uses AI every day to save at least 10 hours a week. — 00:00:00

  • ★★★ The most helpful way Ali has found to learn any tool, especially AI tools, is what he calls cross-context learning: watching how someone in a different industry uses it and applying that to your own context. — 00:00:29

    “what I call cross-context learning”

00:00:58 — Use case one: writing the newsletter with VoicePal, ChatGPT, Claude and Notion

  • ★★ Ali writes his email newsletter and internal memos for his team, and says all his YouTube videos and his team's social media posts are downstream of writing. — 00:00:58 · Sunday Snippets, YouTube
  • ★★★ Ali's three-step process for writing anything: speak into VoicePal, the app he built with his team; put the result into ChatGPT or Claude; then make the final edits in Notion. — 00:00:58 · VoicePal, ChatGPT, Notion
  • ★★ Ali has used VoicePal since 9 December 2023, when his team first started building the app. — 00:01:35 · VoicePal
  • ★★ Ali procrastinates on hitting record for YouTube videos; going through the motions, such as doing his hair, putting on his hoodie and sorting the camera angle, makes getting started far easier, like a slow on-ramp. — 00:02:05 · YouTube
  • ★★ Ali starts a piece of writing by rambling into VoicePal whatever is off the top of his head, usually not at his desk but on a walk with his AirPods in; that is how he creates the bulk of his content. — 00:02:34 · VoicePal, AirPods
  • ★★ VoicePal asks Ali sensible follow-up questions about what he has dictated, and each answer he records is added to the stream. — 00:02:34 · VoicePal

  • ★★★ Ali's newsletter shares his own thoughts, so he uses AI to augment it, helping him pull ideas out of himself rather than doing the work for him: the seed of each idea comes from him. — 00:04:06 · Sunday Snippets

    “help me pull stuff out of myself rather than to do the work for me”

  • ★ VoicePal's export button turns a stream of dictated thoughts into a draft, such as a draft of Ali's LifeNotes newsletter, using Claude 3.5 behind the scenes. — 00:04:40 · VoicePal, Sunday Snippets

  • ★★ Ali almost always gives Claude and ChatGPT basically the same prompt and compares the drafts; he keeps a LifeNotes project in each. — 00:05:28 · ChatGPT, Sunday Snippets
  • ★★ Ali finds Claude better at writing about 80% of the time, but ChatGPT's memory function means it knows more about him, so about 20% of the time it gives a better first draft. — 00:05:56 · ChatGPT
  • ★ Another approach Ali often tries: copy the original VoicePal transcript, with all its ums and ahs, into Claude. — 00:05:56 · VoicePal
  • ★★★ A mistake Ali often sees is expecting AI output to be amazing straight away; he generates four or five outputs across tools until one is about 80% good, then edits it himself in Notion. — 00:07:18 · Notion
  • ★★ Writing his newsletter used to take Ali about two hours of typing; now that he starts by speaking, and sends thoughts into VoicePal through the week, it takes about half an hour. — 00:08:08 · Sunday Snippets, VoicePal

00:08:37 — Sponsor read for Shopify

00:09:35 — Writing the favourite-things section by hand; subject lines with Notion AI

  • ★ Ali does not use AI for his newsletter's section of favourite things of the week: he writes it himself. — 00:09:35 · Sunday Snippets
  • ★★ Even with AI, when Ali has a clearer vision of what he wants to say, typing it himself helps him express himself, as in a paragraph fanboying about Tim Ferriss's podcast interview with Brandon Sanderson. — 00:10:09 · Tim Ferriss, Brandon Sanderson
  • ★★ Ali uses Notion AI, opened with Command J, to suggest 10 subject lines for a newsletter email. — 00:10:56
  • ★★ Ali says he has used Claude and ChatGPT for years and his team uses AI for pretty much every aspect of its workflow and his personal life; he asks viewers what they want to see in more videos of the series. — 00:11:40 · ChatGPT

00:12:08 — Use case two: data analysis of a YouTube analytics CSV in Claude

  • ★★ Data analysis is another major use of AI for Ali: any CSV or spreadsheet he can give to ChatGPT or Claude to analyse. — 00:12:08 · ChatGPT
  • ★★ Ali downloads a CSV of his YouTube analytics for the last 365 days, gives it to Claude and asks it to suggest the next 10 videos to make to maximise views and subscriber growth. — 00:12:34 · YouTube

  • ★★★ A follow-up prompt Ali likes to try with almost any prompt: tell the AI it has given a level one response and ask it to go deeper with a level two and three response. — 00:13:24

    “I want you to go deeper and give me a level two and three response.”

00:14:19 — Use case three: Claude as a tour guide in Taiwan, ChatGPT for Valentine's sushi, and sign-off

  • ★★ A couple of weeks before the video, Ali and his wife went to Taiwan for their babymoon, as they have a baby coming in a few months; he used Claude as his personal tour guide there. — 00:14:19 · Izzy Sealey
  • ★★ In Taiwan, Ali and his wife spoke any question they had straight into Claude and read the answers to each other: Claude was their own personal tour guide. — 00:15:51 · Izzy Sealey
  • ★★ For casual voice search such as tour guiding on the go, Ali prefers Claude to ChatGPT because Claude transcribes with one click where ChatGPT needs two: the friction removed decides it. — 00:16:46 · ChatGPT, friction
  • ★★ Ali does not like ChatGPT's real-time voice feature because it talks too slowly. — 00:16:46 · ChatGPT
  • ★ Ali asked ChatGPT for sushi he could cook for his wife on Valentine's Day, since she loves sushi but is pregnant and cannot eat raw fish. — 00:17:09 · ChatGPT, Izzy Sealey
  • ★★ Ali generally prefers to speak to AI tools and get their responses in text, going back and forth. — 00:17:46
  • ★ Ali has been experimenting with Perplexity for search-type tasks. — 00:17:46

In the description and comments

  • ★ In a comment under the video, Ali says he is thinking of putting together AI-related resources for viewers and asks what they would find most helpful. (hedged) — creator comment

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: artificial intelligence · ChatGPT · Claude · Everyday AI · VoicePal

Also: People: Brandon Sanderson · Izzy Sealey · Tim Ferriss

Projects: Sunday Snippets

Organizations: Anthropic · YouTube

Concepts: cross-context learning · friction · going through the motions

Places: Taiwan

Products: AirPods · Notion · Notion AI · Perplexity

Also centred on artificial intelligence: AI wrote this Short 🤖 #shorts

Also centred on Claude: 5 AI Tools I Use Every Day · How I use AI as an Entrepreneur (My complete workflow) · One of my favourite AI tools #ad

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