How To Use ChatGPT (It's Not Google, And It's Not About Prompts)
AI is not for answers. AI is for deleting clicks.
You typed "how to use chatgpt" into your phone and got back a thousand articles of prompts.
The question isn't how to use ChatGPT. It's what to use it FOR.
Google spent twenty years training all of us to type a question and collect an answer. So that's what most people do with ChatGPT. Type a question, read the answer, close the tab, get a party trick.
Below are the three levels and the one habit change that upgrades everything (ie speak, don't type).
It's Not Google, And It's Not About Prompts
You don't need AI for ideas. You already have enough ideas.
What you don't have is time, because everything you want done has forty clicks sitting in front of it.
And if you're searching for prompts, you're already behind. Not because your words are bad, but because hunting for prompts means you haven't seen how much ChatGPT can do yet.
What matters is the size of what you ask for. Here's the same job asked two ways.
Small ask:
give me ten dinner ideas
You get ten dinner ideas. You still have to plan the week, check the pantry, write the list, and go to the store.
Big ask:
heres what we ate the last two weeks and heres whats in the pantry. plan next weeks dinners around that, use up what we already have first, then give me the grocery list sorted by aisle and have it ready sunday morning
Same ask, same AI (in this case ChatGPT). The first one gives you ideas. The second one does your week. It cuts clicks and saves you time.
Most people never ask the second one.
There Are Three Levels Of AI Users
Level 1
Typing questions into ChatGPT
You ask, it answers, you copy what's useful and carry it somewhere yourself.
If you haven't opened ChatGPT at all yet, this is where everybody starts: everyday chats, plus voice, photos and files, and making images.
Level 1 is useful, but it has a ceiling: nothing gets anywhere unless you carry it there yourself.
Level 2
Voice prompting and handing over full jobs
Two things change here. The first one is free and you can do it in the next five minutes.
STOP TYPING.
Typing is the bottleneck: you think faster than you type, and the longer the ask gets, the more your thumbs talk you out of it. The big asks are the ones you'll shorten into small ones, because typing them out is a chore.
I use Spokenly. It's free, it runs on Mac, Windows, Linux and iPhone, and it types into whatever app you're already in. Or any dictation app you already have. ChatGPT has its own voice built in too, in the phone app and in the desktop app, so you can speak to it and hear it back.
Then talk to it the way you'd talk to a person who's about to do the job for you.
You say: "okay so my sister in law is turning 40 in october and we're hosting. give me a plan for the whole thing, food, timing, what i order and when, and what i can do a week ahead so im not cooking the day of"
The second thing that changes at Level 2 is what you give it: your material, not your description of your material. You can hand ChatGPT photos and files (ie a PDF, a spreadsheet, a Word doc, a screenshot of your calendar) and ask about the thing itself.
At Level 1 you describe your situation, and at Level 2 you hand the thing itself over.
Level 3
Having it run without you
This is Claude Code and Codex territory, and what gets you here is setup, not a different way of typing.
Work runs on a schedule or on a trigger. Anthropic's own docs say scheduled runs happen in the cloud and "keep running even when your computer is off."
It works even when you're not at the computer.
That setup happens once, and it's the part that keeps most people at Level 2.
DELETING Clicks Is The Job
UI (user interface) is your enemy. It's sucking seconds of your life away without you knowing about it.
Try this: count the clicks in any ordinary task you're doing on the computer.
Find the email from your kids' school about the field trip.
(click) open your Gmail app
(click) search a word you remember
(click) scroll down
(click) check Promotions
(click) check Spam
(click) open the wrong email
(click) go back
(click) open the right email
(click) scroll
Nobody puts that on a to-do list. It just eats your day in ninety-second pieces.
And I think that's the real leak, not Netflix or your phone in general, just the clicks.
AI is for deleting clicks.
At Level 1 you delete none of them, and you've added a tab. At Level 2 you delete a pile of them, because the ask goes in by voice and the finished thing comes back. At Level 3 they're gone, because the job runs on its own and you read the result.
I run my own ad accounts that way. When I want to know something about my ads, I ask instead of opening a dashboard, and the answer is back before I'd have finished logging in.
If it's marketing work you want deleted, I wrote that one separately: How to Use ChatGPT and Claude for Marketing.
Where To Start
Pick one job you've been putting off. Say it out loud into ChatGPT today, on your phone, in the car.
Two habits do most of the work here:
- Talk to it instead of typing at it.
- Ask for the finished thing instead of ideas about the thing.
If you type it you'll end up asking for less, which is, I think, how most people stay stuck at the small asks.
AI is not for answers. AI is for deleting clicks.
And if you read all this and decide the chat window is enough for what you need, that's a real answer. Plenty of people get genuine value at Level 1 forever.
Tell Me What You're Trying To Accomplish With AI
The gap between Level 1 and Level 2 is one habit, and you have everything you need for it already.
The gap between Level 2 and Level 3 is setup: what your AI can reach, what you hand over first, and what stays yours to do.
That part is easier to talk through than to write up as a tutorial.
So tell me what you're trying to accomplish with AI. I'll tell you what level it needs, what to set up first, and what a session with me looks like.
