I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m hopeless at actually digging into new tools and things if I don’t have a purpose for them. So, in the interests of sparking some ideas on what you could use these tools for, here’s something I find the LLMs hugely helpful for: planning projects.

My preferred tool for this is Claude, but Chat GPT also does a nice job.

The first thing to keep in mind is that information helps. I will brain dump into the prompt box: what I want, where I’m currently at on various elements, what my constraints are, and more. The initial prompt for the Claude chat I’m sharing below is 227 words, and I’ve easily doubled that on a couple of of other initial project prompts, so don’t be shy!

The key is, that the first prompt is a question. What additional information do you (Claude) need to deliver the project plan I want?

Once I get the response, I go through and answer the questions (308 words in this case). I suggest you do this in a document, rather than directly into the prompt box, as hitting ‘Enter’ submits the darn thing, rather than getting you to a new paragraph. In fact, I’d do it (and did do it) for the initial prompt as well.

This is the project plan it gave me. Yes, it’s huge, no, it’s not perfect, but it’s a darn good starting point, with plenty for me to mull over.

What I can do from here is to refine areas I’m not comfortable with, and/or give it the time blocks I have available each week (e.g. 30 minutes on Wednesday, 1 hour on Saturday, 1 hour on Sunday, etc) and ask it to give me a schedule. I can also ask it to present the project in task and timeline format (which it sort of already is), suitable for a Gantt chart, that I can then copy across into my preferred project management software (not strictly AI tools yet, but let me know if you want a rundown on the main ones).

If you’re interested in how all this looked to me, you can see the full chat here.

And if you’d rather not bounce off to Claude, this was my initial prompt:

I want to create a six-month project plan to build my blog and newsletter. My blog, AI for Squishy Humans, is an AI how-to for more creative people, who want to use AI to help them, without compromising their human creativity. I publish an article every second Monday, either on an AI tool and how to use it, or a use case for AI in everyday work or life. I then summarise it and add a short industry news round-up and send out an email newsletter on the following Wednesday.

I’ve been going since January, promoting the newsletter to my classes and a few LinkedIn posts, but haven’t done any active marketing. It’s building quite well even with my lack of promotion effort and I’d like this project to look at:

1. useful AI use case scenarios for my creative, non-technical audience I can add to my fortnightly content calendar
2. some low-effort, low-cost marketing activities I can incorporate into my schedule to help grow this a little faster

I work full time and also have a creative writing practice, so I only have 3-4 hours a week, spread across the days, available for this project, which needs to include the time it takes to write the article and the newsletter.

Please let me know what other information you need to help me create this project plan.

Is this sort of post useful? If so, what other use cases or jobs would you like me to explore with AI to assist? Please let me know.