If you’re familiar with Chase Jarvis or curious about how to use AI, you might appreciate this exercise.

I am not a coder, but I love saving time, so for me LLMs like ChatGPT have become indispensable for me. I’ve lost track of all the small programs (Python mostly, some Google Scripts, Some VB for Outlook) that I’ve built with it. I’ve also saved friends and employees time being self sufficient by not leaning on their expertise.

Recently I’ve been using ChatGPT a bit differently, more persistent sessions with “rules”. They contributed to some creativity and productivity blooms for me. I’ve long held the “childlike wonder” about many things, I am very curious and probably more easily impressed than most. Needless to say, I am in that inner child mode today with my most recent discovery.

This morning while groggily waking up, I had an idea to use ChatGPT to help me write an app for Chase Jarvis “Creativity Muscle” exercise. I won’t go into detail here, you can listen to it for yourself here:

How to Optimize Creative Output — Jarvis versus Ferriss (#159)

By the time I got breakfast and arrived at my computer, I had the idea to see if I could actually use a persistent ChatGPT session for this, instead of an outside (likely python tied to Google Apps). I trained it with a few rules such as prompting me for a subject, individual tasks, and “stop”. Low and behold, I can generate a checklist. Here is the sample output from the “export” feature I added (Outside WordPress the bullets are Unicode check boxes):

Topic: What I plan to do today – 2024-12-07 09:15 AM

• Cut the trees behind the pool.
• Clean my office, especially the space above the shelf.
• Read a book for at least a half hour.
• Ride the Honda motorcycle.
• Take a run to the storage facility.
• Watch a Christmas movie.

These tools reward creativity. I can now dictate all this on my phone, simply, to exercise my creativity muscle anytime/anywhere I feel inclined. The moral to this story is that anyone can do this.

I will continue to add new features to this function, and I intend to test using them across multiple sessions, too. I currently have a number of persistent sessions with rules applied to them.

Eventually I do see actual applications or maybe a customized LLM being the ultimate destination. It’s nice to be able to test the value of a tool before investing a lot of time into it.