Level Up Your Daily Journaling Using AI and ChatGPT [LNIM269]

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Episode 269.

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Late Night Internet Marketing.

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This week on the Late Night Internet Marketing podcast, we're going to talk all about how you can use an AI journal to completely replace and improve the journal that you're using today. All this and more on the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.

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The Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast To run yourself. You want to know how to start and where to begin. Can you get out your comfort zone, my friend? Yes, you can do it right when it's late at night. At the end of the day, your dreams burning inside. So keep it up and you will find that you're building your business at night from a little studio in the big doing.

Speaker 1: 1:08

I am your host, mark Mason coming to you early in the morning from the little studio in Dallas, texas. The sun is just coming up and I always chuckle, because late-night internet marketing is the side hustle brand name that I use to describe my online business journey, because most of the time, I'm working late at night on my internet side hustles after the kids go to bed, but sometimes, because my schedule is whatever it is, I end up working very early in the morning, and this morning I've been up early working on various things, and now it's time to record some content from you guys, and I'm very excited about that, because we're going to be talking about my recent experiences trying to journal using AI, and this has been an amazing experience, so much so that I'm prepared to recommend that you give this a try. So, first of all, let's talk about why you would even want to create a journal in the first place, and I can tell you, especially if you're a side hustle, but a side hustler, but for entrepreneurs in general, I think journaling is incredibly powerful, and I was recently talking to my buddy, cliff Ravenscraft, who does a lot of coaching. I was recently talking to my buddy, cliff Ravenscraft, who does a lot of coaching, and he talked about the power of journaling. We discussed the different things that can come of it, but for me I think for a lot of people journaling is a way to express your thoughts, to get organized, to kind of work through ideas that are in your mind. And that's one of the things that's really helpful for me is that when I force myself to journal, I'm actually able to organize my thoughts or expose all my thoughts rather more accurately so that they can become organized in my mind. I find that to be really helpful and that's the reason that I've journaled in the past. When I was talking to Cliff, one of the things that came out that's incredibly powerful for journaling is that when you go back and look at your journal entries especially if you're talking about how you feel, what's going on, what's motivating you to do different things and so forth you can really start to expose patterns in your daily behavior that you can amplify or correct or leverage or whatever's appropriate for that particular behavior. And I, in my journaling and doing these exercises, I've recognized things in my own life like I tend to plan daily and over commit the amount of things that I'm going to be able to do in a day, and then the next day, when I haven't done all of the things that I said I was going to do, I feel a little demotivated or frustrated by that. This comes out in my journaling and that's not necessarily something that I would automatically have noticed without going back and looking at journal entries. So that's a simple but illustrative example of the kinds of reasons that journaling is valuable.

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Recently I tried to get back into journaling and I had a really tough time of it. To be honest with you, I have a very busy life going on. I've got my day job, I've got kids in the house that are high school age they keep us hopping I've got this side hustle going on, and my son plays baseball, as most of you know, and in fact I'm recording this now before we're going to get in the car and drive to another city in Texas for a four day long baseball tournament, and so you know I'm going to be away from my recording equipment. Things are crazy busy and it just doesn't leave much time for journaling. At least that was the limiting belief that I put on myself. So I recently started trying to journal again and I tried all the things that people try.

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I love paper journals. I went out and bought a really nice one. I had these really nice pens and I tried paper journaling and while I really enjoyed the experience, finding 15 or 20 minutes to quietly sit and write down my thoughts wasn't great. And, and you know, the other thing I really miss when I'm journaling by hand is spelling correction, because I just can't spell anymore. Computers have ruined me in that way. I find it personally very frustrating that I don't spell well. I mean, I spell reasonably well, but I'm constantly looking at words, wondering if they're spelled correctly and I just find the whole thing, I don't know, not as enjoyable as it should be.

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So I started trying using what I think is the most popular, you know, electronic journaling method, which is day one. I've also tried things like Michael Hyatt's full focus planner and other kind of pseudo journaling methods. I've tried bullet journaling and so forth, and the big problem that I have is I just had trouble making it stick. So I got to thinking about when do I have time to journal? And one time that I have time to journal is when I'm driving in the car to work, because I do that every day and I'm stuck there and for years I've tried to find various ways to make that time productive for me, and usually that has been turned into consuming content. I've tried creating content in the car, tried various things, but it occurred to me with the new version of chat GPT 4.0 that are 4.0, actually O for Omni that I could actually journal in the car. And here's what I did.

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So I created a custom GPT and if you're not familiar with custom GPTs, custom GPTs are basically instructions that you give the core GPT engine that you can save and use over and over again. They're instructions that tell the GPT what behavior you want it to have. So, for example, the custom GPT that I built, I told it you are an expert in journaling for productivity that's the phrase that I use. You're familiar with all forms of journaling, including bullet journaling, the full focus planner and other techniques of journaling that are done for the purpose of self-improvement. I am using you as a daily journal and each time that I make a journal entry I want you to ask me questions about how my day was, how I'm feeling, how my projects are going, what projects are important to me, and at the end of the conversation I will tell you the most important things that I need to get done at the day. When I'm done with each conversation, each journal entry, I want you to create a one paragraph journal entry in my voice, along with the key tasks that I need to complete for the day. And so that was the custom GPT prompt that I built. It said it would do that and I have been doing this.

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So I get in the car and after I'm on the highway and things are all settled, I put chat GPT into voice mode, just like I'm talking to someone who might be sitting in the car and I ramble on for two or three minutes about everything that happened yesterday. Hey, chat GPT. Good morning. This is my daily journal entry and I'm excited because yesterday I finished these two really important tasks. And here's what they were. They they support my monthly goals in the following way and I liked that because I didn't feel all that great, because you know, I had too much red wine last night and that gave me a sinus headache or whatever.

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I give it all this kind of information that you might normally give a journal about how I'm feeling, what my behaviors and activities have been, what correlations that I'm seeing in the moment, what I want to accomplish, what I have accomplished and so forth. And then at the end of that, I asked ChatGPT to create a journal entry for me and to, based on my summary and the things that it knows about what I want to get accomplished during the week and the month, to go ahead and create a journal entry along with tasks for the day. And ChatGPT, by the way, at the end of that prompt I've also experimented with, hey, chatgpt, ask me a few questions that would help you create a journal entry. That's also very effective and it will ask me questions like how are you feeling, what was the best part of your day yesterday, what challenges did you face, and so forth. It's pretty smart about that, given the custom GPT that I created and as a result of that it creates of the journal entry was and how much it was in my voice and how helpful it was to have that journal entry. So it creates it in the thread and then when I get to work, I just copy that journal entry that it created out of chat GPT and into Apple notes.

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Now I expect in the future I'll be able to ask ChatGPT to actually move the entry into Apple Notes itself, based on what we saw at WWDC. Eventually we're going to be able to control the built-in apps from AI tools like ChatGPT. So I think those features will come, and maybe even the built-in chat bot that Apple will eventually deploy will be good enough to do this and will eliminate chat GPT, the discrete chat GPT app, altogether. It may be that we may be able to have Siri do this kind of journaling journal capture for us and this kind of summary for us, since chat GPT is in the back end, but you don't have to use chat GPT for this. I think any large language model, particularly Clotopus, should be able to do this for you as well. I think it's fantastic to experiment. You know this goes to the big thing. I think, the big thing that we need to be thinking about with AI and so forth.

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You hear a lot of people talking about how AI is going to ruin everything, it's going to take their jobs, it's going to create chaos and disaster and, you know, some of those things may even be true. Change is inevitable and just like when robots came into the automotive industry and changed the way we make cars, just like when cars came in and displaced horses, these new technologies are going to bring with them change. I think the way to think about these things is it's up to us to make the most of that change and make things better. And, as a person who is under threat from artificial intelligence or who feels threatened by artificial intelligence, if that's you, you need to flip the script. And I think it's not that AI is coming for people's jobs. What I truly believe is AI. People who know how to use AI are coming for the jobs of people that don't.

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Ai is a tool. It's no different than a pencil. You know, when computers came, all the typists in the world were worried about how computers were going to make typing obsolete and in many ways they have. But those people went on to do different and, quite frankly, more valuable and higher leverage jobs the admins in my fortune 500 company. Today they are much more powerful than the typing pool was 30 years ago. That's because the technology has lifted them up and given them more capability to do more things, and I think AI will do that for us as well. Ai will make things better, but it's up to us to find the points of leverage so that we are the people who are using AI effectively, coming for the jobs of the people who don't embrace AI. I really think that's the right mindset.

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It's a question of what AI makes possible and what we can do with it, and in this case, this journaling is one great example of something that there was really no effective way for me to do before. But now I can take this time that is, quite frankly, mostly wasted in my car and I can use it having a conversation with ChatGPT, as if there were a person in my car that I was talking to about my day Super effective. Now here's where AI is better than journaling. Ai journaling is better than journaling because I can ask questions of my journal. I can say, hey, journal. I can say, hey, chad GPT.

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Three weeks ago I was making good progress and now I'm not. Can you uh, understand why that's the case? And it can see things like well, I see that you're spending more time on project a than project B. Or I can say, hey, chad GPT. I've told you every time that I wake up with a headache. Can you see any patterns there? Or hey, chad GPT. I've told you every time that I wake up with a headache can you see any patterns there? Or hey, chat, gpt. What are the patterns in my mood that, you see, compared to what I'm telling you, and I've started asking it these kind of questions and it does raise interesting observations and, like any psychologist, I guess not everything it says is true, but it's definitely very interesting and I think that it's the kind of thing that we're going to be able to use AI as a super smart assistant, a very intelligent intern, someone who's helping us accomplish our goals. That's going to be a key use case for AI and that's something I think you can do. So my call to action for you give this a try.

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Treat chat GPT as someone that you're telling what's going on in your life, as a journaling partner, and ask it to create small records of that conversation. Build a journal, try it for a week. Then ask ChatGPT to summarize your week. Tell me what you think. If you think that's interesting, send me some feedback at feedback at latenightimcom. Drop me a line, let me know how that goes for you, and if you know someone who's interested in this kind of thing, be sure and tell them about this episode. Super helpful for me when you spread the word about the show, because then you know we can build this community and I can help more people. Until next time I hope you take everything that you're doing to level 11, like in spinal tap, and I hope it's great for you Until next week.

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Ciao you can do it right when it's late at night. You've been listening to the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. Be sure to visit LNIMpodcastcom today to leave feedback for Mark, download special bonus content, access the show notes and more. See you there. Until then, go and make some great progress on your internet business One night at a time. One night at a time.

Speaker 1: 18:30

Hey, crazy week this week, but I'm really excited about it. I'm about to get in the car and head out to Waco, texas. My son's baseball team is playing at Baylor University this weekend, which is really cool. Super nice field, super nice facility. He'll pitch a little play, a little second base and maybe even a little left field, and the only downside will be it's hotter than the hinges of hell. Already here in Texas we're expecting temperatures up near 100, and that's just really hot to be outside playing baseball. It's hot to be outside watching baseball.

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Fortunately I've got one of those travel baseball parent tents that you put up like at the beach, so at least I'll be sitting in the shade and we'll all be drinking tons of water. I'm taking two cases of water and a cooler to keep it in, uh, in the back of my, my vehicle, so we'll have that with us. Try to stay hydrated all weekend. But it should be fun. The boys enjoy overnight trips. You know their high school age now, so they hang out in the hotel and they go out to eat, and sometimes they borrow the parents' cars and go do stuff in the local town that we're in. So it should be fun for them. For me. I'm going to take my laptop and try to get some work done, but anyway, I hope you have a fantastic week and we'll see you next week.

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Ciao, Late night. Internet marketing.