Ep 810: ChatGPT Tasks: What’s New, How They Work and 5 Secret Shortcuts to Use Today

This is the Everyday AI Show, the everyday podcast where we simplify AI and bring its power to your fingertips. Listen daily for practical advice to boost your career, business, and everyday life. OpenAI announced something about 2 weeks ago that I think the majority of people overlooked. They announced that they were sunsetting the proactive ChatGPT Pulse feature and instead sending some of that compute and those requests to the updated ChatGPT tasks. And I think that for the most part, people overlook this for two major reasons. Number one, I think hardly anyone was using ChatGPT Pulse. I think those that were using it loved it. Me, not so much. But you did have to be on the $200 a month Pro plan. So I don't think a lot of people looked at this announcement and cared because not a lot of people were using it. And when they said, hey, instead we're getting ChatGPT Tasks, well, those were rolled out last year, so people just assumed nothing new to see here, let's move on. But you are absolutely wrong because if you didn't read the fine print— but don't worry, I do— you probably missed some of the new features that OpenAI also included with the new ChatGPT tasks and just some of the dev stuff behind the scenes that's quietly been updated and maybe just not well documented on OpenAI's website. So we're going to be going over that today. I'm going to show you exactly what ChatGPT tasks are, what's new, how to use them, and give you my 5 secret shortcuts that you can use today. So here is the big picture. ChatGPT Tasks quietly got crazy powerful. And like I said, I don't think enough people are using them. So earlier this month, ChatGPT announced the sunsetting of Pulse, but the re-entry and updated version of ChatGPT Tasks. So it's now easier to use ChatGPT Tasks and they work in more places, which is a big unlock. And we're going to get to that here. Here in a bit. And ChatGPT Tasks, I think if nothing else, they're a great, what I call gateway agent. So if you've still been kind of turned off by Codex, as amazing as I think it is, because you're like, oh, I'm not too technical, or maybe if you don't have access to workspace agents inside of ChatGPT, if you haven't used those, well, start using ChatGPT Tasks. I guarantee you if they gave it a different name and gave it a button, this thing would have gone viral. But it's kind of hard to find, and it's not a lot of marketing around it, which is why I think this is probably one of the most underrated features in AI today. So stick with me on today's AI at Work on Wednesday show, and here's what you're going to learn. You're going to know what tasks are, how they work, and the different ways you can use them. You're going to know how to combine the best silent features of ChatGPT with the updated task settings, and I'm going to give you at the end my 5 secret shortcuts that no one is talking about, and you can use them today. Sound good? Yeah, this one is going to be a fast one. Uh, welcome to Everyday AI and our Wednesday, uh, segment, Putting AI to Work on Wednesday. So if you're new here, this Everyday AI thing, it's for you. It's an unedited, unscripted livestream podcast and free daily newsletter helping business leaders like you and me keep up with all the AI advancements. I tell you how to use them. You cut the BS, you show up to work the smartest person in AI, and you will use all this information to grow your company and career. So it starts here, but make sure you go to youreverydayai.com, sign up for the free daily newsletter. And if you haven't already, please subscribe to the podcast on Spotify or Apple Podcasts and make sure you do check out that newsletter because there was a ton, a ton of updates yesterday in the world of AI. I mean, great stuff from NotebookLM, Claude, we got Sonnet 5, we got updates from ChatGPT. So make sure to check out the newsletter. But let's get into ChatGPT tasks because like I said, people didn't look at this. And I do think that this is probably the most underrated feature inside of ChatGPT because for non-technical people who are maybe saying, oh, I'm not really big on the Aesthetic Harness, I'm more of an old school ChatGPT person. Well, Great. ChatGPT, ChatGPT tasks are definitely going to be for you. So if this episode is helpful, make sure you check out the show notes, find the LinkedIn URL. We always put that every single day in the show notes. Repost this and I will send you the guide that we put together, which is a banger. I only do about 2 of these a month because they take a lot of time to put together. So we put together our ChatGPT tasks cheat sheet, which is a practical checklist and 15 starter tasks for beginners to level up with the updated ChatGPT tasks. So you don't got to pay anything. Just go repost this and I'll send it. So here's what's new inside of ChatGPT Tasks and a little bit of a precursor on what they are from OpenAI's website. They said we are making scheduled tasks easier to create and manage in ChatGPT with a dedicated scheduled page, improving task creation and editing flows, more flexible scheduling options, and better notifications. User can schedule one-off and recurring tasks and also ask ChatGPT to check for changes and notify them when there's a meaningful update. So like I said, they kind of tied in this task feature upgrade with the sunsetting of ChatGPT Pulse, which, you know, like I said, I don't think a lot of people use this. I was actually super excited when ChatGPT Pulse was announced. It was supposed to be this a proactive agent that just showed up every single day. There was a dedicated spot in the mobile app, and it was, you know, based on your history. It was kind of like almost like a news feed, right, of what was supposed to be helpful. I didn't like it because I didn't think it was very steerable. I talked about it many times on the show, but, uh, they said, we're retiring Pulse in the next 14 days. This was from last week, uh, and they said, why are you removing Pulse? So OpenAI said, proactive work remains an important part of making ChatGPT more useful. With Pulse, we learned that proactive experiences are most useful when they're personalized, action-oriented, and steerable by the user. We also saw strong engagement with tasks after introducing them in the Pulse surface, showing that people, uh, showing that people value having a dedicated place for proactive work. We're bringing those learnings back into scheduled tasks so users can keep getting useful updates and recurring help in a more focused experience. So this, I'm glad they actually are getting rid of Pulse because the other thing is when they introduce Pulse, if you were on that $200 a month Pro plan, they took away some of the basic scheduling features of ChatGPT Tasks. So I have a lot of paid ChatGPT accounts. I have a lot of paid Claude accounts. I have multiple paid Gemini accounts. Right. So one thing that I hated is to still use scheduled tasks, I had to switch off my Pro account, which had the best usage limits and the best features, and I had to switch over to my Team or my ChatGPT Plus account. But you, if you are on any paid plan, you do have access to the new and updated ChatGPT tasks. So there are limitations. And if I'm being honest, I'm not a big fan of these limits because they're very limited. So I don't know, maybe they found that people are really overusing these within each task. I don't know, but they're kind of low if you ask me. So on the Go plan, which is kind of the step the paid, I think it's like $7 or $8 a month, you can schedule 3 tasks. If you're on the $20 a month plan, you can schedule 5 tasks. If you're on a team plan, you can do 10. And then if you are a pro or enterprise user, you can schedule up to 15 tasks. All right. So let's look live. This one, the actual live version is not going to be as hands-on as we might normally do on our AI Working Wednesday shows, just because so many of these things are going to surface confidential proprietary information. Right. So I have some examples that I'm going to show you, some best practices when using ChatGPT Tasks. But normally on our Wednesday shows, I tell you, oh, make sure to go to our website because we have the video version of this and you're going to want to see the video version., this one not as important, right? But, uh, we're still going to do this nonetheless. So let's go in, livestream audience. Let me know if you can see my screen. That would be super helpful. All right. But it's a dedicated URL that you can actually go and find these if you ever can't. Uh, luckily they're back on the ChatGPT sidebar. Before they got taken away, and even when they were first introduced, they took away the sidebar. So literally the only place that you could get there was the URL. So anyways, you can just go to chatgpt.com/scheduled and it will show you all of your scheduled tasks. Or they do have a redirect because it used to be chatgpt.com/tasks that will redirect you to the scheduled tasks. Or if you go on the sidebar, it is back there. So it's actually the fourth option down in your ChatGPT sidebar, which they updated, by the way. They updated this on the web and on mobile, and it looks really freaking clean. All right. I wasn't a big fan of the old, kind of UX, of the ChatGPT sidebar. I know it's a very particular nitpicky thing, but now they went from maybe like third place to first place. It is really good. I do like the new Google Gemini, kind of sidebar, but I don't know what it is. It's super clean. Anyways, on the sidebar, if you look for the fourth kind of icon down, you can click Scheduled, and that's going to bring you to all of your scheduled tasks. So I've just been doing a lot of— I took out some of my normal ones. I'll put them back in later. So just been doing some testing of some different features. But essentially you have a prompt box there on the scheduled task page that you can enter in a scheduled prompt that will become a task. However, Do not use this. Don't use this. It's a trap. Here's why. At least as of right now, you'll notice one thing that's kind of missing. You can't choose which model to use. All right. And to me, that's a big no-no. So in my testing, when you go to this scheduled task page, it is a minimal, you know, interface. It makes it very easy. But, you know, what I think OpenAI is trying to do is they're trying to make this as easy as possible. Uh, right? They're saying, hey, go in there, just type a prompt. You use natural language. You don't have to configure anything. It's not like you're setting up, you know, if you've ever done any workflow automations or, you know, mapping things, uh, you know, old school Zapier, N8N, Make, et cetera, robotic process automation, none of that. It is a stripped out, naked prompt text box with nothing else. And to me, that's a big miss. So I would not schedule tasks this way. You can go in and edit them and see what's running in the chatgpt.com/scheduled, but I would not put them in mainly because, well, you can't have control over what model you use. Okay, so now I'm just back on the normal interface and I just have a kind of a prompt setup. So this is an example of how you could schedule a task. So, uh, I just typed in schedule a recurring task at 7 AM every day that scans my Gmail. Okay. So one thing to talk, and we'll see this as we go on and unpack this a little bit. It's all about stacking what you already have inside of ChatGPT. So in this case, um, I have different apps connected to my ChatGPT account. So if you're watching, you'll see the 3 that I'm referencing here are my connected Gmail, which indexes automatically, which is really cool, my Google Calendar, and my Google Drive. So when I'm reading out this prompt, you can probably see why this would be super helpful because ChatGPT has access to all of this. And for a lot of busy people that live and die by their, by their email, their calendar, and their storage, which is like me, you probably pre-AI, uh, would spend a lot of time manually going into all of these 3 places. So you could say, you know, your Outlook, your Outlook calendar, and your SharePoint, right? Or Teams or whatever, uh, right? So now in the AI era, we were just pro— uh, you know, reactively prompting because, you know, you'd go in here and say, hey, you know, I can at least have this prompt that would go in there. Now it with Task, it is proactively getting all of this and scheduling it. So you don't even have to do this every single day, right? You set it up once with natural language. So anyways, I said schedule a recurring task at 7 a.m. every day that scans my @gmail and my @calendar to triage my day. Also use Google Drive and research the web as needed to enrich and verify based on my chat history. Here we go. And what you know about me and my priorities. Suggest next steps, drafted email responses, projects to focus on, etc. So I'm going to go ahead and click Enter there. All right. So for our livestream audience, you'll see something if you haven't used TASS yet, it's going to be a new-ish interface that comes up. You're going to see a new little button that would normally not go through. But essentially I can click here, see exactly what ChatGPT is doing. Right? So it's going through, it's saying that I'm going to go, you know, if you look on the thinking trace on the right-hand side, which is for this, I chose extra high thinking because if I'm not sitting in front of my computer, I don't want the GPT-5.5 Instant doing this very important morning triage for me. Right. I want to use the best model available. So you'll see here it's going through, it's looking through all of these tools. And it's setting up this scheduled automation. All right, so we're going to give that a quick second and I'm going to go back in to show you how to edit and check on these things. So as an example, let me go ahead and do this one. Okay, so this is one just as a test. I said every day, every day at 3. Let me go back. Here we go. So I said every day at 3:02 PM, create a scheduled task that checks the stocks for Cerebras, NVIDIA, Google, SpaceX, and Meta, and create an interactive chart using writing blocks, formerly canvas mode. So that was one of my scheduled prompts. So there's— you can hover over it and you can either edit the actual prompt and you can just edit it in natural language. You can also see the frequency. So right now the repeat on this is custom. It runs daily, right? And then it has a time there that I can go and then you can put an end date. So maybe you only want to run this. Let's just say you want to run this every single day for 3 weeks or whatever, right? So you can repeat this hourly, daily, on weekdays, weekly, monthly, or custom. All right. And then you can set any time and any duration and then you can edit it as you want. You can pause any of these as well because like I said, depending on your plan, you only have a certain number of active, active runs or active scheduled tests. And then at any point you can click on it and then you can click View Conversation. So this is going to keep all of this in the same chat thread. And that part is very important because if you are working on a project, let's say you're managing a project and every single day maybe there's updates and I don't— Slack and Gmail and HubSpot, etc. And you might want to share that context, right? So maybe every day, let's just say you're a project manager, marketing director, etc., and one of your big tasks or one of your big projects that you're working on is, well, that one project and it's driving everything. And every single day you're going into your email and your Slack and your HubSpot and you're checking all these things, right? As long as you, number one, have access to use these apps inside of ChatGPT, it's going to automatically not only pull all of those things, at the time that you schedule it, but it's also going to keep that context in mind as long as you tell it to in the scheduled prompt. All right, but you'll see here, at least in the results, you know, give me a nice, very minimalist chart here, right? It pulled all the latest prices for those companies that I, that I was watching. So I do this a lot. I check on different AI stocks, right, that I might have in my portfolio, or I'm just curious on how the news of the day is impacting them. So this is something that I'll probably start using, you know, get a big list of all the ones that I care about, you know, tweak it so I get it to look just how I want, have it to run maybe, I don't know, 2 or 3 times a day, and then I can just go in and check. But having it in the same thread, like I said, is a big unlock as well because it's gonna keep all of that context in mind. All right, so let's just quickly check over on my triage. There we go. All right, so it is scheduled. So it says scheduled daily command triage will run every day at 7:00 AM Central starting July 1st. All right, so let's go ahead, open the sidebar, go into scheduled. AI moves too fast to follow, but you're expected to keep up. Otherwise, your career or company might lag behind while AI-native competitors leap ahead, but you don't have 10 hours a day to understand it all. That's what I do for you. But after 700+ episodes of Everyday AI, the most common questions I get is, where do I start? That's why we created the Start Here series, an ongoing podcast series of more than a dozen episodes you can listen to in order. It covers the AI basics for beginners and sharpens the skills of AI champions pushing their companies forward. In the ongoing series, we explain complex trends in simple language that you can turn into action. There's 3 ways to jump in. Number 1, go scroll back to the first one in episode 691. Number 2, tap the link in your show notes at any time for the Start Here series, or you can just go to starthereseries.com, which also gives you free access to our inner circle community where you can connect with other business leaders doing the same. The Start Here series will slow down the pace of AI so you can get ahead. There we go. And there it is. There is my daily, uh, command triage. And essentially it took my simple prompt and it expanded the prompt as well. So similarly, if you ever remember the, uh, kind of conversational GPT builder where you could give it a very simple prompt and that it makes it much longer and much more detailed. Always make sure to go check that because it took my, my little, you know, 2.5-sentence prompt and it turned it into like 4 paragraphs. But that's one of the reasons is I use that extra high thinking mode. So obviously before I start relying on this, number one, I would go in and click run now and check the results so you don't have to wait until the scheduled time, but also look on the right-hand side and see the actual prompt that used. All right, so that wraps it for at least the live portion. Like I said, not doing a ton of things live, but I wanted to show you, uh, some of the pros and the cons. But let's get back into the 5 secret ChatGPT task shortcuts that you need to start using today. So number 1, MCPs. So I actually have no clue when this happened. Okay, so about, uh, when was this? The end of April, uh, because I was actually in San Francisco, uh, had a bunch of meetings, and I believe I chatted with a few OpenAI people, and this came up in passing. But I remember, at least it was literally the last week of April, for whatever reason, MCP, uh, access was not available, uh, to people on individual paid plans. And suddenly I looked at the developer blog, I looked at all these things. It said, right, they said they gave access back in October. They didn't. I was checking weekly, gave up at some point. But let's talk about the combination of Tasks and MCPs and why this is really important. So if you don't know MCPs, that's Model Context Protocol. This is essentially the glue that brings together all of the different AI apps that don't have direct connectors. So obviously ChatGPT has a great selection of apps, but it doesn't have everything you need. But I would say most modern SaaS application or enterprise software has an MCP server. So if you go into settings inside of your ChatGPT account, if you go into apps and then advanced settings, there's something new called developer mode. So developer mode in and of itself is not new. However, it was not worth using for a while because previously when you enabled developer mode, it actually disabled a lot of the basic features and functionality of ChatGPT. Like, this was back in late 2025. I remember when you enabled developer mode, it couldn't search the web, right? So I don't know why, if it was a bug, if it was a known thing, but they didn't really announce when they updated it. And that's number one. But number two, well, now paid plans. So if you are on the $20 ChatGPT Plus or the $200 ChatGPT Pro account, If you go into apps or sorry, go into your settings, apps, advanced settings, you can now toggle on developer mode, which allows you to connect MCPs, which is huge, right? So for me, small example, right? I use Beehiiv for our email newsletter. There is no official app for ChatGPT. Well, or any, because a lot of what a lot of companies are doing now, instead of, you know, trying to get an official integration, you know, with ChatGPT and Claude and Gemini and Groq and Perplexity and all these other ones. And so they're just saying, oh, MCP, and then anyone can use it. All right. But ChatGPT actually was a little behind. I think Claude led in MCP, maybe Microsoft and Google, and finally ChatGPT caught up. So this is huge, being able to use MCPs and tasks. So all of these services, right, I use dozens of MCPs., and now I can schedule them all in natural language. So I can just say, hey, here's the 8 different pieces of software that I go into every single day and check different metrics that don't have a direct integration in ChatGPT, or I can mix and match them, right? Here's the 5, you know, services, you know, like Gmail and Google Calendar and Slack and, you know, all these other things, plus these other ones that maybe are a little smaller or a little more niche. I can bring them all together with a new developer mode, MCP. All right. Number 2, the number 2 secret. Y'all, quietly, apps are more agentic than ever, and that changes what happens with ChatGPT tasks. Let me just rewind you back to fall 2025 when ChatGPT tasks were first announced. I think it was, let me, let me double-check that. ChatGPT tasks first announced. I think it was back in September of— oh no, I'm completely wrong. It was early, early 2025. All right, so back during that time, they were actually not even called apps, right? So they were integrations or connectors. All right, but early on, right, when you could schedule all these tasks, right, like a year ago, let's say, Basically, they were write— or sorry, read-only, and they were very limited in terms of what all of these apps could actually do. Now, apps are getting more and more agentic with more and more read-write capabilities. It's a two-way street. A good example, well, do you know that if you're using the Gmail app, you can have it automatically send emails, not just read them, not just manage your inbox and flag things, mark them as unread, You know, bulk, do all these different bulk actions. But yeah, you can literally send emails without even clicking a button anymore. All right. All right. I don't, let me just say this. I don't advise most people to do this. I'm just using this as one extreme example. All right. So you could, in theory, let's just say you manage an inbox that always gets the same type of emails every day. You could just create something conversationally that says, when you get this email, do this, and yes, it can actually send an email. All right, uh, so apps are getting more and more agentic. Number 3, you can practice for this super app. Yeah, this one is actually a secret. I posted about this, I didn't see anyone else, but essentially we all know that Codex is the future super app, and OpenAI is doing a lot to kind of merge and bring ChatGPT and Codex together. One small little thing that happened last week, uh, and this was actually a Codex update, so Codex updated And its automations platform became a scheduled platform. And instantly, right, I actually had on my screen, I had my, um, my Mac Studio up virtually and then my MacBook Pro and I updated one and I was comparing them and I'm like, oh wait, this is definitely to prepare for the super app. Uh, right. So now instead of having automations in Codex and scheduled tasks in ChatGPT, now they're both just called scheduled tasks. All right, so this is merging and laying the groundwork and the foundation, I think, for eventually the super app to work a little bit more in merging ChatGPT's capabilities with Codex's capabilities. So there you go. Talk about a secret. No one knows that. Well, except for the people at OpenAI. All right. And for the, like, 10 people that follow me on Twitter. All right. Number 4, and this is a big one. Tasks work inside of projects now, which is great. So tasks have always worked with, like, chat, like, deep research and, you know, working with any files that you upload and all those things. But to be able to use it in projects is great. So it doesn't work with voice mode, it doesn't work with, uh, custom GPTs, but you can work inside projects. Uh, so that means you can have, uh, shared, right? And this is big for Teams because Teams can share projects. So I just did this as an example. I created an example project called the MBA test. I just put in custom instructions that said make sure in every single response say something about the NBA. And then my scheduled task inside this project was every day at 3:31 PM, create a scheduled task to tell me one fact about LLMs. And then, you know, it did that. And then it said, think of it like an NBA player who has practiced millions of shots. They aren't consciously recalling every previous attempt. They've internalized patterns that let them make the next move more quickly and fluidly. So, uh, that's huge. I'm a big fan of projects. I use them, uh, you know, extensively in ChatGPT and Claude when I'm working on the web. So now that tasks work inside of projects, big unlock. And then number 5, last but not least, stacking memory. My gosh, talk about the easiest way to get huge instant value out of ChatGPT tasks without doing any work. So I did this little prompt here. I said, now, based on my chat history and what you know about me and my connected ChatGPT apps, please suggest 10 specific prompts that use one or more apps that I could run on a recurring basis as a scheduled task inside of ChatGPT, make them copy and paste ready, including a placeholder sign in front of the app, like @gmail. Take your time. And it went— I'm not going to show you everything because there's a lot of personal things in there. But my gosh, running this and I used the, I think, Pro or Thinking High, it gave me some amazing ideas that were literally copy and paste ready for a bunch of these tasks that I maybe hadn't even thought of. Because the good thing about ChatGPT's memory and cross-chat history is it's connecting all the dots from all of these different chats that you may not even be thinking. So maybe you're using ChatGPT all the time for the same type of recurring task and you just don't know it. So that's a great unlock. Those are the 5 secret shortcuts that you should start using today. So I hope this was helpful unraveling a little bit on ChatGPT tasks so you know what they are, what's new, how they work, and the 5 secret shortcuts to use them today. So make sure to share and repost this on LinkedIn and I will send you the ChatGPT task cheat sheet. It is great. It is in-depth and includes a checklist and 15 starter tasks for beginners to level up. All right. I hope this was helpful. Thank you for tuning in. Please, if you haven't already, go to youreverydayai.com. Thanks for tuning in. We'll see you back tomorrow and every day for more Everyday AI. Thanks, y'all. And that's a wrap for today's edition of Everyday AI. Thanks for joining us. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave us a rating. It helps keep us going. For a little more AI magic, visit youreverydayai.com and sign up to our daily newsletter so you don't get left behind. Go break some barriers and we'll see you next time.