OpenAI just gave ChatGPT an upgrade that’s been pretty much underrated. Compared to the announcement and arrival of ChatGPT Work, it hasn’t received nearly as much attention.
I tested it as part of my workflow this week, and let me tell you…
This is the AI capability I wish I had started using earlier. I have saved so much time, and even created new income sources leveraging my career expertise as a result.
It’s called ChatGPT Skills, which is, of course, comparable to Claude because it shares a similar name as Claude’s feature, Skills.
Below, I’ll unpack what ChatGPT Skills are, how to create ChatGPT Skills, and how to use them to save you hours of boringly repetitive, administrative labor at work.
First things first…
What Are ChatGPT Skills?
A ChatGPT “skill” is essentially a reusable workflow that contains instructions, brand guidance, if you will, and other resources that ChatGPT needs to complete a specific type of task.
How I like to see it is that you take your best ChatGPT prompt–the prompt that you find yourself inputting over and over again–and instead of repeating yourself like a broken record, you turn it into a skill that you only need to reference once when repeating the process by typing the “@” sign.
This way, instead of explaining in detail what you want ChatGPT to do and how you want it to complete a task every time, you are handing the “skill,” the knowledge, and the resources to ChatGPT to reuse as a manual.
Remember, AI is your teammate, and just as you would create SOPs for onboarding a new team member, a ChatGPT skill is essentially your SOP for ChatGPT.
Why Use ChatGPT Skills Instead Of A ChatGPT Prompt?
Let’s imagine you’re a copywriter for your organization’s or your clients’ marketing campaigns.
To create copy for emails or for social media ads, you repeatedly find yourself pasting the same context into ChatGPT, because after a while it does tend to forget, hallucinate, and mix up information. You find yourself re-explaining your role, the time of year, your audience/market, requirements, tone, brand guidelines, etc.
Pretty annoying, right?
Now, because you’re manually doing this, chances are, unless you already have a prompt in a prompt bank that you reuse over and over again, the outputs become slightly inconsistent because each time you repeat this process, you’re telling ChatGPT something a little different, which creates variables in the final output.
This slows you down from producing valuable work and turning it around quickly for a campaign deadline.
The real productivity gain with AI, however, is when you’re able to reduce the amount of management effort required to get useful output. And with “skills,” you’re able to reduce some of that management effort.
Let me walk you through one of my workflows and give you an example of how I used ChatGPT Skills and the boring work it took off my hands:
The ChatGPT Skill That Saved My Life (At Work)
As a journalist and podcast host, one of the dreaded parts of my work week is converting an interview transcript into something actionable that I can use for my newsletters and articles.
For example, for my Work 2.0 podcast, I often write newsletters alongside my podcast episode that expand further on the context of what my guest had shared in our interview.
But even though I used Grain to record the podcasts and I found it helpful when gathering word-for-word transcripts, summaries, and notes, there was still a gap between the notes and transcript and translating it into something my audience could relate to and understand.
This was honestly the most time-consuming part of my work…until I created a ChatGPT skill.
How To Create And Use ChatGPT Skills
Here’s exactly what I did:
- I navigated to my name on the bottom left corner of my laptop screen
- Clicked on Settings
- Then clicked Plugins
- Then scrolled down to Browse Plugins
- From there, I toggled the bar between Plugins and Skills and clicked Skills.
(Note, the next steps worked for me because I had enabled Grain, a meeting note taker, as a plugin.)
I then clicked on Skills and added a skill by clicking the + sign.
Now, at this point, you’ll notice that there are three ways to add your skills. First, Create with Chat. Then second, Create with Editor. Third, Upload from your computer.
I opted to “create with editor.” At this point, I was presented with the below screen:
For the body of the skill, it’s important to get very specific and break down your workflow step by step, not making any assumptions.
In my case, these were the step-by-step instructions I gave to my workflow:
1. Access the transcript from the Grain recording of the referenced podcast interview
2. Extract the key themes, arguments, questions, and answers from the interview and discussion
3. Turn this data into five article angles, and create brief outlines of talking points for each angle
I described what I wanted the AI agent to do very simply and broke down the steps as if it was a newbie learning my process for the very first time. I also named the skill something which would be easy for me to remember whenever I needed to use it. And for the description box, I used this space to instruct ChatGPT on what scenario this specific skill would be needed.
Following this, I opened up a new chat in ChatGPT Work, selected the Sol model and chose “high” effort and “fast” speed, then typed @ and referenced the name of the skill that I had created, as well as the Grain plugin.
And for the experiment, I prompted ChatGPT: “Turn the interview I had with XYZ guest into an article.”
After about one minute and thirty seconds, ChatGPT gave me a markdown file which included everything directly conforming with my SOP requirements, without me ever having to repeat my instructions in depth again.
This sped up the research, ideation, and outline process of my writing, while keeping my human voice intact.
I saved myself at least two hours each week–about eight hours a month, with just one ChatGPT skill. (You can repeat this idea for Claude skills too.)
Can you imagine how many hours I’d save if I automated my other repetitive, “boring” processes with more ChatGPT skills as well?
