We all know by now that ChatGPT is a seemingly infinite source of wisdom when it comes to productivity. However, for me, the tool is most useful when it comes to researching and writing.
Whether it's for a research paper, an online article, or some form of creative writing, ChatGPT can be a powerful AI productivity assistant. This is not to say it will write for you, but more give you a nudge in the right direction.
There are a few ways that you can use it for these kinds of tasks. You can ask ChatGPT to do your research for you, or come up with some potential angles, or even write an initial draft to give you inspiration.
For me, I’ve found a 3-step prompt that works really well for helping me get a final result that I’m happy with. Here’s how to do it.
Find the insights
To start the process, I tell ChatGPT:
“I want to explore [the topic]. Give me an overview of the key themes, opinions, and expert perspectives surrounding it. Identify what’s most often misunderstood or oversimplified with this topic.”
This helps to get me started. It’s a bit like the initial research stage, and while you can research alongside it, this has saved me so much time in the past by giving a clear overview.
ChatGPT generates quite a considerable information in this step, and it can be slightly overwhelming to read through. If you want it to be more condensed, set a word limit for this stage in your prompt.
You can also ask for specific information to be included if that is important, such as links, tables or opinions from certain sources.
Framing your angle
The above stage on its own can be a bit overwhelming. You’re given a big block of information with no clear theme. That’s where the second step of the prompt comes in.
Once ChatGPT has answered the part above, I then follow up with:
“Now, put those insights into a clear, original framework or narrative. Show how the pieces fit together, highlight tensions or contradictions, and propose a central idea that ties it all together.”
What I especially like about this step is that it picks out some ideas that you might not have noticed about your topic.
For example, it might point out psychological considerations, ideas that are relevant to 2025, or a point that is quite hard to uncover without being a super-powered AI with the internet at your disposal.
Most importantly, ChatGPT can help come up with a narrative that you might want to take with your own work. Consider this to be a stage of inspiration, guiding you towards the end result that you want.
Planning the final product
The final step is to take all of this and ask ChatGPT to help come up with the final concept. For this, I use the prompt:
“Using what you have gathered, help me plan what I should write for the final piece of writing. Offer up suggestions of the best angles and topics that would be most interesting”.
This step avoids simply making ChatGPT do your work for you, instead focusing on the tool’s ability to creatively come up with a final pitch to work from.
I have found that this is especially helpful when dealing with more abstract topics that have a lot of possible branches to go off on.
Sometimes, ChatGPT can be a bit vague here, giving very overarching ideas of where to start. But there are often nuggets of valuable information to be picked out and applied to your final piece of work.
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