4 Every day Ways I’m Using AI to Save Time and Reduce the Mental Load
As a lead VA, ex corporate, senior EA, and freelance paralegal within my business, and an early AI adoptor, I keep up with the fast evolving AI developments as much as possible. If you haven’t started looking into it yet, particularly if you run a business, here are some simple ways to get started with real life case uses.
A lot of the things I’m using AI for are things I’m doing from my phone, and that’s one of the reasons I’ve been using ChatGPT for them at the moment. I am constantly experimenting to find the best fit for me between Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT and Perplexity.
These tasks below are ones I tend to do on my phone and, now that my instructions are set up in the tool, I can talk to it rather than having to sit down and type everything out, which makes a big difference.
I can be making lunch, sorting something out around the house or out and about and just verbally talk through what I need.
I’ve found ChatGPT particularly useful for these sorts of every day tasks, so it’s become the tool I naturally reach for.
Here are 4 case uses in my regular rotation.
1. Using AI for shopping and meal planning
I use ChatGPT to help me organise our weekly meals and shopping. Running a business and juggling family life is a lot, and I was finding that my shopping habits and routines were slipping. My old system was no longer working.
I spent some time training Chat GPT (initially 30 minutes to set it up), providing it with sample meal plans, receipts (no personal data on these apart from grocery items of course!) and lists of regular items and occasional use items. I provided it with detailed instructions on what I want it to do i.e. calculate when items are due in that week’s shopping, create a meal plan and amend the week’s shopping list accordingly, and importantly, to help reduce waste and duplication, AND help me save money.
Each week, I prompt it to ‘build the shopping” and get an accurate shopping list, meal plan and advice on what is working and what isn’t.
This has been so useful.
The result is a much more streamlined shopping list, less duplication, less waste and, importantly, less money spent on things we don’t need.
It also means we can use up what we already have rather than constantly buying more.
For me, this is a good example of an every day task where AI doesn’t need to do anything particularly clever but is a big help.
Each week it gets more finely tuned and it is definitely saving me money and waste.
2. Sourcing gift ideas
I’ve also been using ChatGPT to help me come up with gift ideas. I do love gift sourcing but sometimes if an unexpected gift need arises, I could do with some help.
This could be for one of my children’s friends, a family member or someone who is just particularly difficult to buy for.
I’ll talk through who the person is, what they like, what they already have, my budget and what sort of thing I’m looking for.
Then we can brainstorm.
I might say, “No, not that. What else?”
Or add another piece of information and see where that takes us.
What I particularly like is doing this verbally.
I might be making my lunch while talking through ideas, rather than having to stop what I’m doing and sit down to search.
The conversation creates a list of possibilities as we go, which I can then go away and explore.
It’s a really good example of using AI as a brainstorming partner rather than simply asking it for an answer.
Sometimes to throw a few ideas around until one makes you think, yes, that’s it.
I’m planning on looking more into this and creating a list for each person. I used to keep track of gifts bought in Excel but life has got big and busy, and this has slipped.
I can see myself looking into this more and creating more of a system.
Usually an ad hoc gift purchase would have meant at least one hour of scrolling, thinking and research - when needed, this is now reduced to a 5 minute brainstorm.
3. Creating sales listings
I’m trying to get better at selling things we no longer need rather than letting them sit around taking up space.
Creating listings is tedious and time consuming.
Now I upload the photographs of the items including the labels, and ask Chat GPT to write the listing with a suggested price.
I then just need to check it and amend if needed before listing the item.
Again, as with the shopping, I spent 30 minutes providing customised instructions at the beginning and now just tweak and refine as I go. The more I use it, the more it understands what I want.
Saves a lot of time especially if you have a pile of items to list.
4. Turning my ideas into blogs
And then there’s the slightly less everyday one, but one I’ve found really useful for my business.
I’ve been using a custom prompt I created specifically for my content.
The important bit for me is that I’m not asking AI to come up with my ideas and write something generic in the hope that it sounds like me.
I’m giving it my ideas.
I do have a system but sometimes whilst I am doing something else, I think of a blog I’d like to write (take this one for example!). I verbally talk through what I want to say, explain the context, give it the examples and tell it what I’m trying to get across.
It’s very conversational and I spoke like I was explaining the above case uses to a friend.
It took me less than five minutes to explain the ideas I wanted to document.
Then, using my custom prompt, ChatGPT turned those ideas into a first draft.
We’ve tweaked and refined it together, but the thinking, examples and experiences are mine.
From talking through the idea to having a finished blog has taken less than 30 minutes.
That’s a pretty significant change in how I think about content creation. It’s not me handing over my ideas and thinking to AI. I’m using it to get those ideas out of my head and written into something I will use.
What these four AI use cases have in common
Looking at these examples together, there’s a pattern.
Nothing here is complicated but they do all involve lots of small decisions and repetitive tasks. By themselves, they don’t take a lot of time, but when added up, that’s a lot of time I’d prefer to spend elsewhere.
So I’m not using AI to do something I couldn’t do myself. I’m using it to do the things that I can do but that aren’t a good use of my time.
We often think about delegation as handing a task to another person.
But there are lots of small tasks that we continue to do ourselves simply because they feel too fiddly to explain, too small to hand over or not worth someone else’s time.
Those are exactly the sorts of tasks I’m starting to experiment with giving to AI.
These are even tasks that your VA can become responsible for setting up and managing for you. Our role is evolving to become much more strategic and well versed in AI and automation technology.
Of course, never hand things over to AI without checking it. It does make mistakes, it hallucinates and misunderstands. Its output is as good as the input so it’s worth spending time on learning how to prompt it well.
I’m going to keep documenting the different ways I’m using AI, partly because I hope the ideas might be useful to other people, but also because I want a record of my own AI journey.
It’ll be interesting to look back at this in a year’s time and see how much has changed in terms of AI capabilities and my own AI training and development.
I am opening up 3 AI power hours per month so do get in touch if you’d like support in how to make the best use of it and which tools will best suit your needs.
Get in touch at isabelle@izzwhizzva.co.uk or book a discovery call today.
About the Author: Isabelle Pearcey
Isabelle Pearcey is the founder of Izz Whizz VA. With nearly 30 years of experience as a senior-level Executive Assistant and Business Manager within international law firms and corporate environments, she also brings specialist expertise as an IP paralegal. Having personally experienced the overwhelm of scaling a business, she now helps values-driven founders reclaim their time by building high standard, ethically managed, and reliable support systems with an empathetic, human touch.
