What Are ChatGPT Scheduled Tasks? How to Set One Up

From the video's captions, lightly corrected. [unclear] marks audio we could not make out.

1. 0:00

   Hey everyone, my name is Chris. In this video, I'm going to show you how to build a scheduled task in ChatGPT. Let's get started.

2. 0:08

   All right, the first thing you're gonna wanna do is log into ChatGPT and navigate to the left-hand sidebar. You'll see Scheduled in the top left-hand corner. Once you click that, you'll be navigated over to the Scheduled Tasks screen, which will host all of the different scheduled tasks that you have. Now, you're gonna notice on my screen right now I have none running. That's because I wanna set my first one up on this account with you guys. So let's go ahead and figure out what scheduled tasks make sense.

3. 0:38

   All right, so what makes a good scheduled task? A good scheduled task is something that does not need my input in the middle of whatever it's doing, and it's something that's run on a schedule, on a routine, and preferably it's something that does not change very much between runs. Now, you can always update a scheduled task based on your preferences after you've set it up. But things that are really nuanced that require you to change it almost every time, those are best left. Maybe you've got your scheduled task as a reminder for you, but not actually to do the work on your behalf, because you'll be frustrated having to change it every single time.

4. 1:14

   Things that make sense, just as basic examples for most people, are email triaging. On a daily basis, read my email and classify what's important to me. Make sure you include my boss as important. Make sure you include any kind of outreach that I need to follow up on as important. Make sure you put the marketing stuff in the non-important category. That's a great scheduled task.

5. 1:39

   Another great scheduled task might be reviewing your website's analytics or your social media performance on a weekly basis, helping to optimize and understand any kind of trends that are coming off of your organic content. So those are a couple good ones. Maybe things on a quarterly basis. That's about as far as I would go. I think anything past that, you start to get into issues of there just being too much lag time and too much risk of something changing in between. But happy to be proven wrong.

6. 2:13

   So let's go ahead and get started with setting up our scheduled task. Now, for me, I'm gonna use that email example, and maybe I'll have to blur out some of the details because I do have client information inside the email that I've hooked up.

7. 2:26

   The first thing is, if you do not have your email connected, you can go over to the plugin section and navigate to your Gmail or your Outlook inbox and go ahead and add that and connect it and go through the login flow there. Once you've done that, navigate over to the Scheduled Tasks section, and we'll go ahead and we'll give it a definition for this task.

8. 2:50

   "I'd like you to set up a scheduled task to routinely check my email every single morning and flag for me all of the things that are important based on a scale of clients being the most important, vendors being second important, and then marketing emails being least important."

9. 3:15

   So once you've typed it into this scheduled tasks function, it knows that you're trying to create a scheduled task, so it's going to ask me the things that it needs to do to go ahead and set that up.

10. 3:27

    Another thing is scheduled tasks are not something that has to be created through that function. If you're actually going into any normal chat and you've arrived at maybe this email triage in another chat, you can just zoom right into that conversation and say, "Hey, can you run this for me on a schedule?" So there's nothing magic about that little button in the left-hand corner for the scheduled tasks, other than the fact that it shows you all of the ones that you do have active. So let's go ahead and let it do its thing, and we'll come back once it's finished.

11. 4:00

    Okay, so we can see that it's finished up here, and it's created this little daily morning email priorities scheduled task. Now, every morning on a daily basis, it's going to go at 8 AM, and it's gonna read my Gmail accounts. I could have told it Outlook accounts. I could have told it Gmail and Outlook accounts. But it's gonna read my Gmail accounts, and it's going to classify things in order for me.

12. 4:24

    Now, something that's really cool is rather than just have it run and output what it's thinking is important to me in this chat, I can actually tell it, modify it, so that it will email me at the top of my email inbox a personal email just for me about what I should be paying attention to.

13. 4:45

    Now, it's important to note that there's actually the ability to add multiple Gmail inboxes now to your ChatGPT experience, which means that if you've got multiple emails running along, one of the most painful points was trying to monitor everything. Now, you can have it do it just for you. Let's go ahead and move on over to the next example, which is product analytics.

14. 5:06

    All right. So, little bit of a backstory here on our website. We run an executive AI coaching firm where we help work one-on-one with executives, helping them to achieve whatever they're trying to with AI. A lot of that has to do with education or helping them navigate some risks in their firm regarding AI. And one thing that we do to get the word out is we run advertisements. So we actually run ChatGPT ads and Google Ads, and we use a certain monitoring service to help us understand how people are entering our site and maybe where things are getting caught up, or where people are having issues. So we use it, called PostHog.

15. 5:47

    So what we're gonna do is we're gonna set up a scheduled task to review on a weekly basis our PostHog analytics, and let us know which advertising channels are working the best and where people are possibly getting stuck inside our application. So let's go ahead and ask for a scheduled task for that.

16. 6:08

    "Could you please use our PostHog integration and run a weekly AI analysis using the information inside PostHog to figure out where customers are coming from on our website, where they may be getting hung up, any kind of key metrics that would be important for us to understand, especially as we're spending ads, and we're spending money. We need to know which advertising channels are performing the best and maybe if there's ways that we need to improve our website."

17. 6:44

    So just as a little bit of a prompt engineering conversation while it's working here, I've told it purposefully we're gonna use PostHog. So I want it, inside the scheduled task, to know to use my connector. So I've said that. I've given it maybe some high-level goals. I didn't tell it, "Go examine the bounce rate on our website and figure out XYZ thing about device patterns." I'm letting the Astra model, which is an incredibly capable model, kind of fill in those blanks for me. I gave it the overall goal of what we're trying to do, telling it, "Hey, we're spending money right now. Could you please help us get the most of that money?" Letting it use its brainpower to help me achieve my goals. So anyways, it's gonna go ahead, and it's going to run this real quick. We'll go ahead and wait until it's finished.

18. 7:33

    All right. So we can see that it's finished up here. Did the exact same thing that it did on the emails one, except this time it worked through, and it used the connector a bit to help shape how it knows how to coach that analytics function. So we can see our Aravise AI website. That's what it is connected to right now, which is our main company.

19. 7:55

    What I want to do for you here is just so you can get a feel of what these reports are gonna be like, let's go ahead and ask it to run it for us. Now, best practice would've been on the last one for us to ask it the same question, and then we could have workshopped a little bit and said, "Nah, change this, change that." But let's just see what it looks like right now so that we can be following some best practice here. "Could you please run this for me one time so I can see what the output looks like?" All right. Come back to you in a second.

20. 8:28

    All right, so it looks like it finished up here. And what we can see is it worked for almost eight minutes. And the cool part about the scheduled task is once it's set up, I don't have to say, "Go do the analysis anymore," and then wait eight minutes. I can just show up every Monday, and it'll have already run it.

21. 8:47

    And we can see, now we had a little bit of website changes in how we track things and set it up, so this is not indicative of real search. But what we can see is that it is uncovering some good information for us. You know, it's got who's going and booking appointments with us. Is paid search working? Is organic search working? What about AI referrals? We've actually had a couple people come through on AI referrals. It's pretty cool.

22. 9:14

    But anyways, the point being, this is something that we can customize. I could ask it so many questions to where it would build a routine dashboard every Monday for me and deliver that for me with actionable insights. All I would need to do is tell it what I want here and tell it to modify my scheduled task. Now, the cool part is you don't have to wait around for it anymore once you've done that. You just set it and forget it and continue to reap the rewards.

23. 9:44

    So hopefully that gives you a couple of ideas for going through and building out these scheduled tasks. My name's Chris. Thank you so much for joining me. Please drop a like and subscribe. If you are looking for some help on your AI journey, feel free to go over to our website, aravise.ai. Go ahead, set up an appointment. You know, it's free to set up an appointment. So thank you so much for joining me. Really excited to have you here. Looking forward to the next one.