nikki (00:00)
Can I ask you something? Have you actually figured out how to use ChatjpT to make your life easier?
Because I feel like everywhere we turn, somebody's telling us that AI is going to change everything. It's going to save us hours, make us more productive, help us get organized. But nobody is talking about what that looks like when you're a mom in your 40s. You've got kids going in different directions. You're trying to take care of yourself. You're working. And you've already got about a thousand things going on. And the last thing that you need is another tool that you have to spend a ton of hours trying to figure out.
But here is what I've started realizing. The biggest opportunity with AI isn't necessarily doing more things. It's spending less time figuring out how to do the things that we're already doing.
So today I wanna share three ways that I've been using ChatGPT to make everyday life easier, where I think it's genuinely helpful and where I think that we're making it way more complicated than it needs to be.
So I wanna talk a little bit about why I even got to this point with AI. And I think it's worth noting that...
There are so many things going around about AI and that it's gonna take everybody's jobs and this, that, and the other. Do I think that after doing research and understanding that yes, things will change. There will be things that will be automated. There will be things that will change the way that our kids approach work and life and all of the things that they're doing in a much different way than we did when we were growing up.
all of these different tools to help me because I don't want to figure things out every day and why not build a situation and build a life where I can start to automate things that I don't want to think about all the time. And so I really like new tools and I think that that's something that I learned through my years of corporate work where I would teach people how to use new tools. And so for me, that always became something
that I just genuinely enjoyed. And so, you know, not every impressive tool is actually gonna save you time. And I think that's really important to know because there's a difference between something that looks like a really great idea and something that's gonna save you time. So, you know, I think...
So I think before we go into even talking about what this looks like or the prompts, I want to introduce you to, I think, the real problem that you're trying to solve. Because if you're anything like me, I think it's really important. So first, I want you to think about how many decisions you make during the day. And they're not necessarily big decisions. They could be little ones. Some of them are big, some of are little.
What are we having for dinner? Do I need to go to the grocery store? What time does practice start? When am I going to work out?
Did I schedule that appointment? Did I send that email? When do I have time to go to the bathroom? Right? that's one for me. I have to go to the bathroom, but I gotta do this and I gotta do this. And so that's a decision that happens in your subconscious without you even realizing it, but it is still a decision. And research has shown that you make over 200 decisions just about food every single day. So imagine how many other decisions you're making all of the time without even realizing it.
And, you know, when am I going to find time to do the thing I keep saying I'm going to do that I've been putting off for three weeks, right? Those little decisions, they all matter.
And I don't know about you, but sometimes it's not even doing the thing that's difficult, but it's leading everything that leads up to it. If it's figuring out when you're going to do it, how you're going to do it, what you need, where it's going to fit, and then you finally get around to actually doing the thing.
And this is where I think, like I said, we have an opportunity to use technology and the advances that we have to our advantage and using them a little bit differently. And yes, we can talk all about productivity, but productivity isn't always necessarily the goal either. So the goal might not be to get more done, but what if it was just spending less time trying to figure out how to get the things done?
Okay, so we've been conditioned, you know, to think that if we're struggling to keep up with everything that we must need a better planner, a better schedule, a better morning routine, which I'm not knocking morning routines. Everybody should have something that works for them. But sometimes we just have too many things going on that require our attention. And another planner is not going to change that. No matter how many times in college I used to
get out my little planner and rewrite all my assignments and rewrite all the things I had going on because I'm a planner, right? But that's not gonna change the fact that you still have to find the time to get the things done. So when you download another app or you build another complicated system or...
something that's going on there, I think it's worth asking whether there's something that you're doing repeatedly that could be simplified. And for me, I started with meal planning because it was something that I actually absolutely hated every week. And it got to a point where I would just start winging it. Well, winging
It was costing me trips to the grocery store and it was costing me more money because I didn't know what I was gonna plan. But I was also getting so tired of sitting down on Sundays and thinking to myself, okay, what do we have this week? And looking at what we had every week, trying to figure out where things fit in. And so for me, I needed to start with meal planning first. And it's truly why I built One Less Thing, which is my 10 minute personalized meal planning system.
And you can find out more about that in the show notes, but that's for me where it all started. But for you, maybe it's organizing your week or figuring out how to fit working out or exercise into your schedule. Or maybe it's planning your birthday party or organizing a vacation or even researching a purchase, right? Those aren't necessarily difficult tasks individually, but when you start to add them all together, it's a lot of time spent figuring things out. So I think...
So I wanna give you some practical ways that you can.
Also work this in to your schedule, okay? So let's start with something we almost all do. And it's trying to figure out how we're going to fit everything in to our week, right? Because here's what tends to happen. It's Sunday night and we've got great intentions and you're gonna work out four times and you're gonna get your steps in and you're gonna finish the project and you're gonna make dinner every night. And then Monday or Tuesday happens and you're like, well, yeah, my whole week's already blown. And you've got a kid who needs to be somewhere.
or an appointment you forgot about, something comes up with work, and suddenly that perfect schedule that you made on Sunday just really doesn't make sense anymore. So here's something that you can try. Instead of asking ChachiPT to make you a weekly schedule, I want you to give it the reality of your week. Okay, tell it when you work, what appointments you already have, when your kids have activities, and what you're hoping to accomplish.
And then I want you to ask it to help you figure out what's realistic, right? And that's the part that I think that's really important because, you know, I don't need AI telling me and making me this beautiful schedule that looks productive, but isn't going to work in my schedule because at the end of the day, like that might not work for me or the time. So I wanted to tell me if I'm trying to fit 15 hours of activities into like the three hours that I might have or
I want help prioritizing these activities. Okay, so what actually needs to happen this week? I need to get my workouts in or my steps in or my movement. Those are non-negotiables for me, right? What are some things that can wait? Do we create a wait list for them? And maybe where can I leave a little room for things that are probably gonna come up that you maybe not even realize? So that's a much more useful application than having it create another.
perfect schedule for you that you're gonna look at and you're gonna be like, yeah, this just doesn't work. Okay? So I will drop a couple of prompts in the show notes for you to try because that might be helpful for you too.
And then, send me an email to let me know like what helped, what didn't help. My email is Nikki at intentionalwellnesscoaching.com. Send it to me. I want to know because I want to know how, you know, these things could help you or maybe, maybe not help you. Right.
So here's another example. The second way that I think, know, mom, a lot of us moms have health goals, right? We have health goals or personal goals. And this is one of my favorites because I spent years coaching women on nutrition and habits and helping them, you know, reach the goals that they say they want to reach. And here's something that I know to be true.
A lot of women don't need to be told that exercising is good for them. We all know that, right? We've been told that for a long time. And we could sleep and wake up and we're like, yeah, we know we should move, but what happens when we don't want to? Or, you know, we've got...
other competing priorities or we also don't need another person telling us to drink water and eat vegetables and prioritize protein and go for a walk, right? Because that's not necessarily the information that we're missing. It's trying to figure out how to make all of these things happen consistently. And I think this is where sometimes we approach goals the wrong way. We create a plan based on what we accomplish without really thinking about what our schedule can support. So let's say one day you decide that you're gonna strength train for
four days this week. That's great. But you work full time, you have kids with activities three nights, you have an appointment on Wednesday morning and Friday, it's already packed. So instead of recognizing that, we make the plan anyway, and then we don't follow it, and then we get frustrated with ourselves. I mean, how many times have you done that? Because if you're like me, I've done it a ton of times, and then you start to blame yourself, right?
And this is where you can start to leverage AI and the power of it to help you.
work through that, right? Not to tell you what your goals should be, but to help you make them, make progress toward them with the time that you actually have, okay? So maybe I can't do four workouts this week, but maybe I can do two full workouts in a shorter session, or maybe I could move workouts to a different day, or what are my backup plan, what's my backup plan if something comes up, okay? So.
Another thing that you could ask is, if I keep missing the same workout every week, what is this telling me about the plan? Maybe the timing's wrong. Maybe I'm doing too much. Maybe I just need to adjust the goal temporarily because I have a lot of things going on in my life. And the point is that AI isn't going to know more about you than you know yourself, but it can help you look at situations from a completely different angle. And sometimes that's enough help to have us make a more realistic
decision for what's going on in our lives. So I think, we've decided sometimes that when we can't make these workouts work that, you know, success is anything less and it's a failure and we've created the situation or making some progress feels like we're not making progress at all. So I will include a prompt in the show notes of things that you can try.
and that will help you as well. Okay, and I think the third example is meal planning, right? This one, like I said at the beginning,
was one that just totally would derail my weekends because I would sit down, I would open Pinterest, I would look at all the things, I would write down things that we had that we normally had, but then my kids would get sick of them and so it just became a whole cycle. And it would take me an hour and I would ask everybody what they wanted, I had to compare what schedules we had going on that week and to be very honest, I just couldn't do it anymore. I was getting so frustrated and so
annoyed because everybody's like I don't care what we have but then by the week they'd be like I don't like this or this doesn't sound good and so now
traditional meal planners that are out there, they just give you a set plan of meals, but they don't, they don't know what your family likes and what your family doesn't like and how much time you actually have. And that's where I was getting super frustrated because yeah, I've tried plenty of meal planners, but I still ended up having to make the meal plan myself because half the time my kids wouldn't eat some of the things, but I still had health goals that I was trying to meet. And I still like, I still very much care about health and
because I think it is one of the fundamentals of our lives. And so for me, the details around who doesn't eat certain things, if you're trying to increase protein, what if a day is packed and you only have 20 minutes, what if you need leftovers?
that definitely changes a lot of things. And yes, you can use ChatGPT and ask it to make you a personalized meal plan. And that's great. It's actually a good way to start experimentation. But I also think that, you know, this is where...
even more personalized solutions come into place, right? And it's the reason I said at the beginning that I decided to build my own personalized meal planning system because I wanted a guided process that you didn't have to figure out every single question to make the meal plan something that my family would actually eat. Okay? And for me, that was really, really important. And so...
in the personalized meal planning system that I built, guess what? You provide the information about your family and it gives, chat the instructions and out pops your meal plan and it takes 10 minutes.
And this is the kind of AI that I just really genuinely get excited about. And it's not just about making another list. It's about making a repeated task so much easier to handle. So if you're curious and you want to go grab one less thing, the 10-minute personalized mail planning system, the link for it is in the show notes. All right, so I also said I wanted to...
include where AI isn't the answer because I do think that that comes up and I think that it's really important for us to talk about because AI can't do everything and I don't think we should be using it to do everything.
I've had lot of fun experimenting with different things that I've built, different solutions that I've built for myself, but I also don't think we need to use it for everything. Sometimes it's faster just to do the actual thing, and sometimes the setup takes longer than the task itself, okay? But when you're handling repeated tasks, I think that's where it's genuinely useful.
So I think we just need to be smart about where we're using it and not using it for things that we don't have to figure out regularly or sometimes I...
I also think it's really important for us to remember that these tools are not a substitute for our own judgment, okay? So especially when we're talking about health and money and parenting or anything with like real consequences, AI can help us organize the information, think through some of the tough questions, help us prepare, but it can't take away what we're actually using our brains for because that's incredibly important. So.
so you can give it enough context to help you without entering every private detail about your kids and your family or your medical history. So look, the goal is to make it easier, not create a whole new set of problems.
So if you've been curious about leveraging the power of AI, chat GPT, Claude, but you haven't really known where to start, here's what I want you to do. Don't go download a ton of new apps, don't buy a course, don't spend your entire weekend watching videos about all the things that it can do because that's just gonna...
be really frustrating to you too. I want you to just take one thing that you're tired of figuring out. Maybe it's organizing your week, maybe it's adjusting a goal, and then I want you to open Chat GPT and tell it what you're struggling with. Give it some context. And context is incredibly important because when you haven't given it the context, it's not gonna be able to, it's just gonna spit out a generic answer. So you're gonna tell it what you've tried, tell it what the result needs to look like, ask it to help you create a simpler process. Then actually try the suggestion.
because that's the part that matters. And not whether you've created a crazy prompt or a dashboard, but does it make it easier and does it save you time? And would you use it again? Because if the answer's yes, great. And if not, that's great too. But...
you've maybe found one thing that you can make a little bit easier. And then if you want, you can look for another. So that's how I think about right now making my life 1 % better is not changing everything all at once, but finding just small practical ways that add up over time. So I know I've mentioned this before,
My personalized meal planner, One Less Thing, the 10 minute personalized meal planning system opens officially tomorrow. So if you're listening to this at the time of recording, it's October 26th and tomorrow will be October 27th and One Less Thing is officially open and.
I built it because I know how frustrating it can be to figure out meals for an entire family while you're also trying to eat well yourself. And I wanted to create something that wasn't just another generic meal plan, something that would help you build a plan around your family, your food preferences, your schedule and nutrition goals. It uses AI, but you don't have to figure out the entire planning process yourself. And I've already had several moms test it and the feedback has been incredibly
exciting. So if this is one of those things that you would love to spend one less thing, figuring out, then I will leave the information in the show notes.
So before we close, I just wanna leave you with one question today. What's one thing in your life that you are spending more time figuring out than you actually need to? Because I think sometimes we're so used to doing things in a certain way that we never stop to question whether there's an easier option. And maybe there is. Maybe it's a simple system. Maybe it's a new tool. Or maybe it's just asking for help.
Or maybe it's deciding that something doesn't need to be quite as complicated as we've made it. So whatever that looks like for you, I hope that you'll pick one thing this week and experiment with making it a little bit easier because that's what this podcast and that's what I'm all about. Making midlife and mom life a little easier, one small improvement at a time.
