ChatGPT Launched Scheduled Tasks

Recently ChatGPT launched a new feature called "Scheduled Tasks" for paying ChatGPT users.

How to use ChatGPT Scheduled Tasks

1. Toggle into the model with schedule tasks (click top left of ChatGPT, change model)
   1. note: OpenAI are planning to simplify the model selector soon, so this might not be required when you're reading this!
2. Ask ChatGPT to do something at a future date and time (you can ask it to recur as well, e.g: every Monday morning)
3. ChatGPT will do that thing at that date and time and then notify you that it's run
   1. If you have the ChatGPT app on your phone it can send you a push notification when it runs
   2. you may also configure via your ChatGPT settings to be emailed when it runs
   3. note: currently it just emails you saying it ran and you then can click the button in the email to open the result in a ChatGPT chat
   4. Here's an example of the email:

Interesting Use Cases for ChatGPT Scheduled Tasks

1. Every Monday morning, prepare a summary of the most interesting AI news over the last week
   1. basically use ChatGPT to curate yourself your own custom news summary
2. Every Thursday morning prepare a LinkedIn post covering the latest update in the Cloud hosting industry
   1. pre-generate content
3. Create a meal plan every Sunday night for the next week [specify your meal plan requirements, low carb, dairy-free, between 400-60o calories per serve, etc)

What I want from ChatGPT Scheduled Tasks

One small missing piece that I really hope the OpeAI team rollout soon is actually including the result of the scheduled task in the email body.

This would open the doors for some amazing automation.

I could have OpenAI generate content, complete research tasks, summarise recurring information, then email it to me.

Then I could use Zapier/Make to read that content directly from my inbox and funnel it into the correct place or to the correct person. (think: clean and forward content to other people, put into a Clickup Task, create a draft social media post, etc).

This would be a no-code game changer!

My 2 cents on ChatGPT Scheduled Tasks

With my product hat on, I do love how OpenAI rapidly release features that may seem quite simple, basic and sometimes even partly broken.

They're launching quickly, letting users test, collecting feedback and iterating really fast.

Scheduled Tasks are no exception to this. When I first tried using them, it simply didn't work. It wouldn't run, it wouldn't notify me, etc. But now that it is working, it's useful, but still limited.

That said, I can see a pathway forming for scheduled tasks. OpenAI will be closely watching how we're all using this feature and they'll be quickly learning on what to build next.

The main uses cases I have for ChatGPT Scheduled Tasks right now in my life are automatically generating content on a recurring basis. This doesn't save me much time because the alternative is I would have a recurring reminder elsewhere, then I'd open ChatGPT and run that prompt myself when that recurring reminder popped up. This basically saves me a step.

I also certainly don't use it for 1-off reminders. My iPhone does a pretty good job at that right now!

All that said, it's absolutely a step in the right direction and I appreciate they're launching features early without waiting for perfection.