AI for boring project tasks
Yesterday, WAO ran a pre-mortem for a new project we’re kicking off. We used Whimsical, but wanted the results to be in a spreadsheet for easy reference. This is the kind of thing that used to take probably an hour of my life and was a boring task. LLMs like GPT-4o make it easy:
![Screenshot of Whimsical board with the instructions:
We ran a pre-mortem activity and I've attached the output. Working step-by-step, I'd like you to:
1. List all of the risks (yellow sticky notes), grouping them by theme (blue stickies). The sticky notes are grouped horizontally.
2. List all of the preventative measures (orange stickies) for each of the risks
3. List all of the mitigating actions (green stickies) for each of the risks
4. Create a table that I can copy into a Google spreadsheet that has the following columns:
- Theme
- Risk
- Preventative measures
- Mitigating actions](https://dougbelshaw.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/pre-mortem-transcription.png)
A few minutes later, I had this:
![](https://dougbelshaw.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Project-risks-and-mitigations-Google-Sheets-2.png)
As Ethan Mollick says in his book Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI, it’s worth experimenting with AI in almost every corner of your life. Being able to outsource boring stuff, and using it as a thought partner for things you may have missed can be transformative.
For example, I asked a follow-up question as part of this conversation for things that we might have missed. It surfaced things around cultural (mis)understanding, data security, and policy changes, among other things.
At the moment, the main point of friction for me, whichever LLM I seem to use, is that it forgets context. Sometimes, that can be even within the same chat — and even sometimes when I’ve created a custom GPT. I haven’t used Amazon Titan, nor have I done much with Google Gemini, so I should explore those further.
Ideally, what I’d like is for an AI assistant to conversationally implement workflows that we’ve agreed upon in kick-off meetings. That may also involve my AI assistant talking to a client’s one for scheduling, updates on progress, etc. I think it would be a huge improvement to the hodge-podge of systems involved in multi-organisation projects.
Yikes, that is making me rethink. So the input was the image of sticky notes- looks like they were something like jamboard /etc generated (not a photo of hand written stuff). But wow, if it can do that from image data.
I just wish I had more boring tasks (just kidding). Thanks Doug
Hi Alan, yes that’s right – we use Whimsical which is a bit like Miro/Mural. I use it for this kind of stuff art the time, like recreating tables from PDFs, etc.
Great use case!
Thanks Brandon 🙂