Choosing Your First ChatGPT Task

Time to take action

You now know the three habits: start with recurring work, save what works, and use the tool consistently. It’s time to pick your first task and put it into practice. This lesson is a hands-on exercise: by the end, you’ll have identified your task, written your first prompt, and generated your first result.

The selection matrix

Evaluate each candidate task on two axes. The first is ease of implementation: Is the output well-defined—an email, a summary, a list, a table? Are the input data easy to access, or do you have to beg for them from three different services? Can you judge the quality of the result yourself? Three yes answers signal a task ready to delegate this week.

The second axis measures potential impact. How much time do you currently spend on this task, how often does it come up, and does the quality of the deliverable affect your visibility with your team or manager? Pick the task that scores highest on both axes. If you’re unsure, favor ease: a quick early win is far more motivating than an ambitious project that gets stuck.

What this looks like by role

A manager or project lead will naturally start with the agenda for the weekly team meeting, the follow-up summary email, or the Friday progress report. A sales rep or business developer will focus instead on the pre-meeting brief before a client call, the follow-up email after the meeting, and the CRM data analysis to surface priority opportunities.

On the marketing and communications side, obvious candidates are this week’s LinkedIn posts, the competitive intelligence summary, and adapting existing content to a new channel. In HR or administration, think sorting and categorizing incoming applications, answering recurring internal requests, and preparing data for monthly reporting. Finally, a developer will benefit from handing off code and technical decision documentation to ChatGPT, writing bug tickets with full context, or producing release notes.

Your first prompt in four steps

Start by defining the task by completing this sentence: “Every [frequency], I need to [task] for [recipient].” For example: “Every Monday, I need to prepare the product meeting agenda for my team.” This forces you to name the recipient, which then determines tone and level of detail.

Next, gather your inputs. For an agenda, that means last week’s notes, open tickets, items raised by the team, and upcoming deadlines. This collection takes two minutes and sets up everything else: a well-written prompt with missing data won’t produce anything usable.

Finally, write your prompt in a few blocks: a role if needed, context, this week’s data, and the expected output, as in the example below. These map to the four elements recommended in the ChatGPT documentation: goal, context, output, and constraints. Note that nothing is vague: team size, duration, objective, and minute-by-minute breakdown are all explicit.

You are my assistant for preparing the weekly product meeting.

Context:
- Team of 6 people (Product Manager, 3 devs, 1 designer, 1 QA)
- 45-minute meeting every Monday at 10 a.m.
- Goal: align the team on the week's priorities

Here is this week's information:
[Paste notes, tickets, and raised items]

Generate a structured agenda with:
1. Quick review of last week (5 min)
2. Blockers to resolve (10 min)
3. This week's priorities (15 min)
4. Miscellaneous items (5 min)
5. Next steps and owners

Format: bullet points, concise, actionable.

The fourth step is iteration, and it’s the one people skip most often. The first result won’t be perfect: if it’s too long, ask to shorten it; if the tone feels off, specify the desired style; if information is missing, add it to the prompt; if the structure doesn’t work, provide an example of the format you want. Resist perfectionism—your first prompt doesn’t need to be excellent, it just needs to work—but don’t go to the other extreme by piling on every imaginable piece of context from the start. Start simple, and enrich it week by week.

Your turn

Get your first result. Apply the matrix to three of your tasks and pick the best one. Write its prompt using the model above, run it with real data from this week, then make at least two rounds of adjustments. Note what you corrected: this will be the basis for your template in the next lesson.

Official sources: Prompting (ChatGPT documentation) · New OpenAI Academy courses for the next era of work (OpenAI)

Key takeaways

• Use the ease/impact matrix to choose your first task
• Favor ease for a quick, motivating early win
• Structure your prompt: context, this week’s data, expected output, and constraints
• Iterate every week—the perfect prompt doesn’t exist on the first try
• Once you’ve mastered the task, save the template and move to the next one