Two Cool AI Time Savers: AI for first drafts on performance evaluations? Or book summaries?

Hi everybody, Randy Dean, Email Sanity Expert here. As you can see, quiet day working in my home office, but I wanted to make a really quick video that will basically give you a couple really cool little AI tips that I think could save you quite a bit of time that I've received from actually people that have been at my recent programs out on the road the last few weeks. All right, so let's dive in. And I have to tell you, I've set these up in advance so you don't have to watch me type, but let's pop out real quick into— actually, this time Microsoft Word. And what I'm going to do in Word is you can see I've drafted up a little paragraph prompt, not basically a long sentence. And what I'm going to do is do a Ctrl+C, and now I'm going to pop out into my Copilot. Now what's interesting about this, I could probably do this in the Word document utilizing the Copilot icon inside the Word document to do the same thing, but I'm just going I'm just going to do it in the generic version that's out on your website. And here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to click on this and do a Ctrl+V now to paste this in. And as you can see, this was the idea. I was talking about how you could use Copilot to do the first draft of an email and showing that example in my session. And somebody watched this and he raised his hand, he goes, could I do something like that to do a performance review? You know, it was a room full with a lot of supervisors and that was a big part of their job was doing performance evaluations. And so I wrote up this little sentence right here. Can you draft a summary paragraph for a performance evaluation employing their strengths, or highlighting the employee strengths in active listening, project management, coordination, helpful hands-on behavior, and problem solving? See, because when you're a supervisor, you got to write these darn things up. And so I'm giving the prompt, letting this do this. And now let's hit this little submit message and see what this does for me. Oh my, that's great. See, how's that feel? Well, let's think about a tweak here. Can you add in near the problem solving how they helped fix the printer network issue? Ctrl+C. Let's go back to this and Ctrl+V. And now let's do this. For example, their quick and efficient resolution of the recent printer network issue showcased their technical aptitude and proactive attitude. Come on. Now, here's the thing. I want you to realize I would not just copy and paste this right into their performance evaluation. What I I recommend everyone do is take this as a tool to help you create a first draft so that you're not spending so much time overthinking, you know, that first draft effort, and then take what it generates and rewrite it into your voice. So, you know, you're going to probably be able to add in some nuance, you're going to probably be able to make it sound more like you, but The way that this can save time in terms of helping you with the generation, especially on a first draft effort, is a fantastic tip. Like I said, came from my audience following the fact that I did this for, you know, an example of how to do a draft email. Now for the second example, I want to give a shout out to program attendee Jim Chambers, who came up and shared this idea with me after I did this at a different session down in Florida. And oh my, I think this is going, going to be super useful for me personally, because how many of you have sort of your professional development reading list that's gone out of control? Well, check this out. He came up to me and he said, you know what I'm doing? I have all these books I want to read. I don't have time to read all of them, so I'm having AI provide me summaries. And then from those summaries, the books that I'm most interested in, those are moving up on my reading list. Let me show you something here. Let's pop into here and notice that I have Don Aslett's Clutter's Last Stand, which by the way is one of my absolute favorite books on the whole concept of organization and clutter, mostly physical clutter, but still lots of good tips that can help you and written in a really fun manner. So add this one to your reading list. But let's take a look at how you can do this. Watch this. I'm going to go back into the AI tool and I'm going to say, can you please provide a summary of key points from Don Aslett's Clutter's Last Stand? And you'll notice I write my prompts like questions, like I'm sort of talking. You don't necessarily have to do that. You could just make it a statement and then let the AI do it. I just feel like it's the way my brain works. All right, so let's try something here. Let's see what it does. This is fantastic. Now take a look at this. So 6 key points that came out of the book. Now, one of the interesting things about this is, let's try this. See, you can go even a little bit deeper. Can you give more depth on the de-junking tips? And hit a second prompt. I love it. I'm gonna read like 300 nonfiction professional development books in the next year by not reading them. But once I like the best, I will be able to assess that this is content that really matters by utilizing this capability. And I would even say after you read a good book on a topic that you like, maybe using these tools to do a summary so that you get sort of that after you're done sort of key point review might also be super useful too. And so, you know, just taking a look at this capability both on the front end of being able to help you with drafting new documents and files that can, you know, really help you. And also on the other side, you know, helping you with learning information that might take you a lot of time to get through on your own and have the AI tool sort of help you consolidate that so that you can get that information much more quickly. You know, these are two fantastic ways to use your AI tool. And so, you know, take a look at that. By the way, if you're doing other things sort of similar to this or other things that are helping you really save time with your AI tools, please write those in the comments. I'm trying to start sharing more of these tips in my programs and, you know, the audience is being fantastic. Was sharing with me some of the ways they're saving time. And so I'm going to try to make more videos from these practical tips from the people that tell me ways they're doing this. So I hope you found this one useful. Let's finish this one up. I'm going to go back in here. Let's jump out to the final slide. Once again, I am Randy Dean, email sanity expert. Taking it sort of casual today. But if you'd like to learn a little bit more about me and my programs, send me an email, randy@randaldean.com, and I'll send you my productivity PDF tip sheets. You can also go out to my website, obviously, and learn more about who I am and what I do. And if you do either of those things, I'll get you some bonus materials that will hopefully help you get more productive, save time, and get better with your technology. Thanks, everybody. Have a great day.