3 AI Habits So Powerful It Feels Like Cheating

AI tools like catchupt are supposed to make us more productive. But often times the friction of using these tools is just high enough that we default to our old and less efficient workflows. So here are three loweffort habits I use daily to eliminate the friction of using AI so we don't have to rely on willpower alone. Let's get started and thank you HubSpot for sponsoring a portion of this video. Number one, the everywhere AI shortcut. All right, check this out. I press option space on my keyboard, type gpt space, and I paste a prompt. Press enter. I'm taken directly to a new chat GBT window, and it's already taking action, right? Or let's say I want to open up my Claude projects page. Same thing, option space, claude, P, P for projects, enter. And I'm brought directly to my projects page in Claude. So, as you can see, instead of wasting time context switching when using AI, for example, like copying a paragraph, I want to proofread, stop what I'm doing right now, going to a new tab, opening up a new chat, pasting in the paragraph, right? Instead of all of that, we can just use a global keyboard shortcut to let us access AI immediately. The first step is to install a launcher app, which gives us the ability to open up a universal search bar. Mac users have two options. Alfred, which is what I use, but it's paid, or Raycast, which is free

to use. Windows users can just use a free Power Toys app from Microsoft. Step two, the interface differs slightly for each app, but the setup logic is the same. For example, in Alfred under the web search tab, we can add a custom search and we're going to paste this URL string exactly as shown here. I'll leave this down below. You'll notice that there's a dynamic search query within the curly brackets. title chat GPT keyword GBT to activate the shortcut and you can click save. I'm just going to cancel out since I already have this set up. And now when I bring up the universal search bar and type GBT space, I can input or paste any prompt I want. Although the setup for Claude is exactly the same, just a different URL, using the Claude shortcut like so, will bring us to a new Claude chat with the text prefilled, which is great when we want to review the prompt before executing. Google Gemini, for whatever reason, does not have a dynamic URL. So, here's a workaround. First, we want to copy the URL for the Gemini web app and then create a custom web search and then paste the static URL here. title Google Gemini keyword let's say gem save so that now when we type gem and press enter we're brought to a new albeit empty Gemini chat this is also how I access claude projects by the way uh claude p right since this is a static URL as well clawi/ projects pro tip number one I use chatp search a lot so I've set up another chatb shortcut with the search feature enabled by pending this string to the dynamic query. So when I type gbt search space and input a prompt enter, you'll see that chatbt took action with web search enabled. Pro tip number two for paid users, you can force chatbt to use extended thinking mode by adding think hard about this at the end of your prompt. So using the same example as above, let's say we have GPT space compare nan with zap year. Think hard about this. Press enter. And I'm going to fast forward this next part. And as you can see, it took the slower thinking approach. And while we're here, all paid users should default to the thinking mode and not auto because research has already shown that the intelligent routing function does not work well and on average produces less optimal responses. If you're enjoying these strategies, I recommend checking out the AI Agents Unleash Playbook from HubSpot, who's sponsoring this segment. I actually took a lot of inspiration from this resource for my last two AI agents videos. So, it's kind of awesome they agreed to be a sponsor. This free playbook breaks down AI agents in such a beginner-friendly way, using simple language, relatable examples, and pretty graphics. For example, one of my recent hottakes is that 90% of the time, a simple workflow performs better than an AI agent. And that was inspired by my favorite part of this resource, a decision tree graphic that makes it super clear when an AI agent is actually appropriate. I won't bore you here. It's a must readad if, like me, you don't have a technical background. I'll leave a link to this free playbook down below, so check it out. Thank you, HubSpot, for sponsoring this portion of the video.

Habit number two, use text expanders. Again, let's start with a demo. I'm in chatbt, right? And I type col GPT concise clear. And watch what happens when I type in that last letter. Boom. an entire prompt appears, right? I use this exact prompt over 20 times a day to improve my writing. And there's no way I'm typing this out every single time. Alfred users can go into the snippets tab to set up these shortcuts. As you can see, I have a prompts collection where I've added my frequently used prompts from my notion prompts database, which I'll talk about later. And as you can see, let's open one of these up. The full prompt goes here and the activation phrase is up here. Raycast users can enable the text expander snippet extension. And for Windows users, there's a free and open- source text expander app called Beef Text. I'll share the clear and concise prompt along with two others I use all the time down below. Uh, one for emails and one for formatting. But to really develop this habit for yourself, right, it's best to list out and save three to five prompts specific to your workflow and force yourself to use them at least once a day for 2 weeks. For example, I make educational YouTube videos, so I have an instant analogy generator that explains complex concepts using simple analogies. If you're a creative, you might want to save a prompt that analyzes an attached image and describes the style, color palette, and mood so you can reverse engineer the image. Pro tip number one, although I still use custom GPTs and Gemini gems, I prefer text expanders most of the time because of its massive flexibility. So, for the clear and concise prompt, right, the bracketed options here let me adjust on the fly. So, if I want to uh remove fewer words, I use trim the fat. If I want to remove more than 50% of the words from my writing, I can choose more concise. So, I can pick what I need in the moment, right? As opposed to custom GPTs that are basically preset. Pro tip number two, once you familiarize yourself with the launcher and text expander apps, you can start chaining these workflows together. So, for example, instead of copying text from Google Docs, opening up a new chat, let's give Claude some love, typing in a prompt, improve my writing, and then pasting the text like this, right? Instead of doing all that, we can simply bring up universal search Claude space, paste in the text, press enter to bring up a new chat with a prefilled claw chat, and then we can type in a text banner keyword to instantly expand out the prompt. By the way, I have a free AI toolkit that cuts through the noise and helps you master essential AI tools and workflows. I'll leave a link to that down below as well. Next up, we have the

prompt multiply method. To be clear, all the Frontier models from the large AI labs have gone so good that even weak prompts will still get you decent results. If you remember from my prompt formula video, the best prompts consist of six components: task, context, example, persona, format, and tone. But in reality, most of us, myself included, do not follow the structure every single time, unless the task is very high stakes. What do I mean? Let's say you're preparing for a routine presentation at work. There's nothing writing on this, so you input a lazy prompt. Act as a senior product manager, persona, recommend improvements given this goal, right? Task and a little bit of context, and you receive some great feedback from AI. This is a low stakes situation. Alternatively, what if you're considering refinancing your mortgage given interest rate changes? This decision will impact your finances for many years. So, unless you're a NEPO baby, this is a very high stake situation. — I built this company with my own two hands. Just me, that computer, and an $8 million loan from my father. — You really did it all on your own. — Option one, you input something basic like the bank is offering a 4. 2% 2% interest rate for my mortgage. What are the factors I should consider? And you'll get a decent response. Or option two, you can ask AI to generate a much better prompt optimized for your current model. I can paste the initial lazy prompt right here and change this placeholder to let's say try to be five thinking model for example and ask to give me three variations and then I can let it run. Looking at the results, we can see right off the bat, this is much more comprehensive. You are a neutral mortgage advisor. Uh tone and persona. Uh I've been quoted this mortgage rate. Provide a concise, practical decision guide tailored to me. That's a task. Okay. I won't read the whole thing, but the new prompt provides a lot more context. It'll also create tables. So that's format. And even offer examples. Compare monthly payment at 4. 2% 2% to 3. 7% and 4. 7% respectively. I won't waste your time by running this. Try this out yourself to see the massive difference in output quality. And since we only use this for highstake tasks, it's worth the extra step of generating a new prompt. And of course, you should save this in your text expander, for example, GPT AI prompt to further streamline the process. Bonus tip for

everyone still watching, embedding AI triggers. Remember the notion prompts database I mentioned earlier? This is how it looks. I save useful prompts I come across or ones I create myself, right? And since every prompt has its own page, I can hyperlink to this from anywhere in my workspace for easy access. In the 101 notes thread with my manager, for example, I have a link to the refine unstructured thoughts prompt right at the top. So before each meeting, I'm always reminded to use this prompt to clean up my messy notes. But this isn't just a notion thing, right? For example, I have a weekly calendar reminder to summarize snippets for leadership. And in the description, I've added a direct link to my chat GPT project for easy access. So, as you can see, the key is to embed these AI touch points directly where you're already working. If you want to build your own prompts database, check out this video next where I walk you through my entire workflow step by step. See you there. And in the meantime, have a great one.