Boost your productivity by automating bulk tasks with Tana and ChatGPT

Knowledge work often demands the repetitive execution of tasks, which can often be demoralizing. Thankfully, Tana's integration with OpenAI's ChatGPT provides a way to automate these workflows and avoid the pain.

How it works

You first need to setup an account with OpenAI, after which you can setup API keys for different applications. There is a cost to using the OpenAI API, but it is very cheap if you use GPT3.5 for perform your tasks (my bill is usually less than $1/month). It is worth setting account limits so that you don't get any nasty surprises.

You then generate and API for Tana and paste it in your settings (Your account > Settings > API Keys > OpenAI field). Once this is active, you can access a variety of AI commands, but the easiest way to get started is to use the "Ask AI" command, which allows you to define custom prompts. Tana's Prompt Workbench is particularly useful here, allowing you to test AI completions and refine your prompts.

My SEO automation example

Imagine having to write meta-descriptions, titles, and populate keywords for a number of existing blog posts you realized were not properly optimized. This is the situation I found myself in when migrating my website to WordPress.

This sort of repetitive work takes away from the core parts I need to focus on, i.e. creating interesting and valuable content. Thankfully, all of the content was available in Markdown format for me to copy and paste into Tana. Once this content was ready in Tana, I used the AI enhanced field functionality to build custom prompt for specific fields. Although the quality is not always the best, these provide a great point of departure to populate the relevant information in WordPress.

Conclusion

The combination of Tana and ChatGPT offers a potent tool for automating repetitive tasks in knowledge work. However, one must be cautious. As with all automated processes, there's room for error. It's always a good practice to test your AI prompts thoroughly before running them in bulk to ensure the desired output.

However, the time savings and efficiency gains are undeniable. So the next time you find yourself bogged down with repetitive tasks, remember there are tools available that can make your workflow much quicker.