Three questions to ask yourself before you ask AI

You know what’s harder than making decisions? Knowing when to delegate. That’s one of the lessons I learned during my (brief) stints as a boss, and it applies to AI, too.

ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini can all be very powerful and productive in our everyday lives, but only if we’re delegating the right tasks to them. And picking the right tasks to delegate can be surprisingly tough.

Sometimes, instead of delegating, we ask AI to make decisions. (I know I have.) Which portable monitor should I buy? What should my new website look like? Where should I go on vacation? Should I break up with my partner? (Please don’t ever ask AI that one.)

Instead of asking AI to decide for you, ask AI what it can do for you — and actually, even that question is one you need to answer yourself. Again, deciding what to delegate isn’t easy.

Welcome to another edition of Prompt Mode, your weekly AI newsletter.

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Still, to make it a little easier, try asking yourself these three questions before you hand off a task to AI. If you can answer “yes” to some or all of them, you’ve found a solid chore to delegate to ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini.

Question No. 1: Is it boring?

Some of the best tasks to hand off to AI are the really boring ones.

Say, for example, there’s a stack of manuscripts on your desk and you need to count all the commas. Or (in the world of coding), you have a giant log file and you need to find all the error messages. Or maybe you’re shopping for portable monitors and you want their features compared in a chart.

Three different tasks, all of them a bit tedious, all of them perfect for AI.

Question No. 2: Is it repeatable?

Tasks that begin with phrases like “Each day,” “Every time,” “Whenever (such and such) happens” also make for great ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini duties, particularly since all of those AI chatbots support scheduled actions.

For example, I’ve already written about how AI can be a terrific email assistant, triaging the messages in your inbox and tucking away the marketing junk. It’s a daily chore that I’m happy to hand off.

Question No. 3: If AI performs this task perfectly, is there anything left for me to do?

ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are great at (for example) compiling data for a company presentation, coding the pages of a website, or gathering average hotel prices and daily temperatures for spring break destinations. All those tasks tee up decisions for you at the end.

But if you’re about to give a task to AI that involves following that task through to completion, end-to-end (“Gather our monthly sales data, write a report, and send copies to every member of the team”), you’re ceding the decision making to AI.

Putting it all together: Delegate the legwork to AI. Keep the decisions for yourself.

Prompt of the week: The ‘daily to-do transcriber’ prompt

Sometimes, the best way to brainstorm is to fire up a voice memo app and just talk, particularly when it comes to your list of daily tasks. But plucking the to-dos out of those disjointed ramblings can be a chore unto itself.

Here’s where ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini can come in handy. With the right prompt, you can make any one of those AI chatbots sift through your notes, pinpoint your gotta-do tasks, and turn them into a list, all without adding any extraneous commentary. Give the “daily to-do transcriber” prompt a try.