SPEAKER_01 0:34

Did you know that some AI tools can go directly into your folder on your computer, find the information it needs, does a bunch of processing and thinking, pulls it all together, analyzes things, and then gives you ta-da, a finished product. Well, honestly, watching it looks very magical, but there was one thing I didn't anticipate in the beginning when I was using one particular AI tool. I kept hitting my usage limit. So I bought more credits. Then it happened again, and I bought more credits. And then I'm realizing, wow, buying a lot of credits. Okay, enough. I need to figure out what's going on here. And that's what we're going to talk about today on this podcast. If you're burning through all your credits, you want to stay tuned because I'm going to talk about how you can conserve credits and still get amazing output here on the Amplify Your Authority podcast. Stay tuned.

SPEAKER_00 1:41

From burnout to breakthrough.

SPEAKER_01 1:55

Hey there, or welcome back. This is Marissa. I am your host of the Amplify Your Authority Podcast. I am so glad that you are here, and I am going to try to give you in the next 20-25 minutes some really good info so that you can use AI regardless which one is your favorite, because many people have their favorites, and I get it. But you'll be able to conserve credits just by using a few little simple practices. So this is what happened to me. I have been following AI, and of course, I use Gemini and I use Claude and I use Chat GBT because I'm trying to figure out which one's better. Really, the bottom line, whichever one you're focusing on and you're working with the most is going to understand you and learn from you. I don't think there's any particular one that's better than the other. Some people think that Claude is better, but they've been Claude users since the get-go. So obviously, Claude is going to understand them and has learned what the user wants. Now I've used both and I use ChatGPT in the beginning, and it has learned how I work and has been incredible as far as the output it provides. So it's up to you. But either way, regardless which one you use, now all these platforms have these amazing features that do all kinds of stuff. And now even ChatGPT is starting to burn some credits. So we need to be mindful as far as how we use it. When I was using Claude and I was using co-work and I was using skills, I was burning through the credits. It was fun watching it work and it was great what it could do. But I thought I don't really want to upgrade my subscription and I don't want to keep buying credits. I got to figure out what's going on. And that's what I did, and that's what I'm going to share. A few little tips for you. And I also have a free resource for you that summarizes not only the tips I'm going to give you here today, but more. So stay tuned for that. So in order to explain what we're doing wrong, let's kind of go back a little bit. When we first started with AI, the assumption was more context will provide better results. And that was true to a point because we were strangers, right? AI didn't know who we were. We weren't sure what AI was going to do. And it was learning from each individual user. So Jane, John, Sally, Mark, all these different people were using AI and it was trying to figure out well, what's unique to Sally? What's unique to Mark? What's unique to Marissa? It was trying to understand the user. And if we didn't put enough context, it would just give whatever it could find in the internet and fill in the blanks. So the reality was when we first started using it, we were just asking questions and it would give us some answers, but it's become really sophisticated. And when I started using Claude and I was using all the various features that it had, well, I burned a lot of credits. And I wanted to be able to begin to use workflows. So what I realized was there was a lot of duplication. There was a lot of uploading documents over and over again that really wasn't necessary. And I had to figure out how does AI think? How does AI process things? So across the board, regardless which one of the platforms you use, this is very general, but it'll give you kind of an overview on how it thinks. It's no different than when you look at platforms like website platforms. They all sort of work the same. Many of them are drag and drop now. So once you learn one tool, you can use those skills and pretty much look at another application or another platform and pretty much figure out how it works because they all kind of speak the same language, they all kind of operate the same way. They're very user-friendly. This is kind of the same thing with the AI. So what I realize, especially now that we're getting into skills, and if you don't know what a skill is, it's just something that you create that becomes an assistant that's really good at one thing, and you use it for that one thing. And then if you want a different skill, you can create as many as you want. So I can have a skill that's really good at helping me write content, like an editor. I could have a skill that's really good at writing copywriting, which would be different. It's a different skill set. I could have a skill that's really good at creating images. And so I create these skills. And the thing is, each skill has its own nuance because you are explaining to it what you want, you're giving it context, and you're really fine-tuning what you want to see as far as the end result. So it's learning and it's adapting and it's creating the skills needed so that it aligns with your brand and your voice. So what I did was I went back to the drawing board. And since everything has been evolving with all the new releases of features the past few years, I thought, you know what, it's time to clean up everything. So I realized that many of these skills would be using the similar knowledge for certain tasks. So logically, it made sense to clean it all up. And I realized after going back and forth with AI and having a conversation with it, that I needed two documents that would give it anything that it needed to understand me and my business and my audience. And those two documents were my business knowledge base, which was the source of truth for my business. Instead of having audience information in one document, my offers in another document, my brand voice in another one, I consolidated everything. And so this was the business knowledge base. And then I had a second document, which was my business operating system. Now the business operating system was a little different. That's where I keep my values, principles, processes, standards, methodology, the why behind the choices I make. It helps AI understand not just what it needs to know about my business, but how I want it to think about and approach the work that I do in my business. So it's a little different. So I cleaned everything up and it needed it because I had a bunch of documents, right? I think I made this analogy before. You know how people buy a small house, a starter home, and then they update and they add another bedroom here, and then they add another piece here in the property, and all of a sudden you've got all these added pieces, and you kind of lost the whole outline of the house. You know, it doesn't, it doesn't look like one cohesive thing. It looks like it's been pieced together. Well, that's kind of what I had with my AI documents. So I wanted everything consolidated and cleaned up. Once I got that done, it probably took me a half a day to just get all of the documents I had, go through with AI, explain what I wanted to do, how I wanted to use it now, and how I wanted to use it in the future. And we cleaned up all those documents and I reviewed the documents and we had some iterations of it, and then the final product. So once I had that, I was able to create my skills and update many of the skills that I had created in Claude. I had created some skills in Claude using the skill creator. So I started from scratch, and by this time, ChatGPT had the skill feature for the lower plans. So I thought this is what I need to do. And you create skills in the same way that I recommend creating anything in AI. Start with a conversation. Let AI know in a simple chat what you want to do, what the objective is, maybe the things that you're not clear about, and just have this conversation with it. And then it will begin to help you understand that what you want is really the job of two skills or three skills or just one skill that could do variations of what you want it to do. So you talk to AI and it will give you some recommendations. What I wanted at the end of the day was an entire org chart with all of my AI assistants. Okay. I think I shared that in another podcast. But now we're getting to the AI usage. When you begin to use skills and you begin to use some of the features like schedule tasks, you're going to start using credits. So you have a certain amount of AI power with your subscription, right? That you get with your subscription. And when you're using the chat, you can use that all day long and you're not going to have any issues. But when you begin to go a step above that and you want some charts and you want analysis and you want PowerPoints and you want more of an end product, ChatGBT specifically has a tab called work and you use that. When you use work, it will use credits. Now it will renew itself every five hours, but you want to be mindful what eats up credits. So when I first started, I realized that the way I was using it originally in Claude was a big mistake. I was having it go into my desktop, go into a folder that had a bunch of folders, and it was going through too much information for something that I needed done when I could have simplified it for AI. And that's why I was burning the tokens, credits, all of them measure it in a different way, but just know it was reaching a ceiling and I needed more. So, number one, decide what the task is before choosing the files. So this is what you can do up front when you're creating skills, is ask AI for this skill. What files do I need? And I do have my two foundational files it can reference, but what files do you need right now so that I can create this skill? And what it does, just like magic, it'll take everything that you give it, even if you have like 10 documents, and it will just pull and look at it and say, this will work for the skill, this won't, this will, this won't. And it'll kind of sift through all of it. And then it'll say something like, Well, when it needs to reference your two foundation documents, we can have it do that. So the skill itself runs lean and clean. And that is going to save you on credits because it's only going to have to process or review all the information that is needed for that specific task. When we start throwing up a bunch of documents and stuff, it's a lot of work and it's going through everything over and over again and it burns credits that way. So, what's the task that you need done and what files are needed? If additional files are needed. Now I'm finding with my skills and my two foundational documents, I very seldom have to upload anything. Maybe an example could be something that I would upload. Or maybe if I had a document, I'd like the format of it, and I say, I want something like this, but I want this content in it instead, something like that to give it a little extra instruction. But most of the time it already knows what it needs to do because the SOP is built into the skill, the standard operating procedure. So you ask it what information could help support this AI assistant. And once you do that and it asks, it will write the prompt for you to create the skill. Now, both Chat GBT and Claude have a skill creator. I wouldn't start there. No, no, no. Don't start there. I want you to first work in the chat and go back and forth and just go through the mess of going back and forth, uploading documents and everything, and then it will finally give you a prompt. It'll give you kind of a summary of what it's doing. It'll give you a prompt, and then you go to the prompt creator and you put that in there, and it will create the AI skill. And it's nice and lean and mean. And if it needs to reference your foundation information, it will. This will save you credits. So another thing you want to keep in mind, the shared knowledge isn't always necessary, but when it is, it will access it and not access it for a simple task where the shared knowledge isn't really important. So the shared knowledge, it lives in your library and it'll reference it if it needs it, but if it doesn't, it won't. So this will save credits too. So you revise selectively too. That's number three. If you're going to revise something, especially if you're using images and you want to change something in an image, you may absolutely love the image, but there's one little thing that doesn't look right. Make sure that you tell it specifically to leave everything else alone and only change this one thing. That's it. But everything else, the design, the lighting, the characters, whatever you have on there, leave everything alone except this one little thing. When you're specific and you communicate, then it will target that one little thing and it won't try to regenerate the whole image. And you don't want that anyway, because if you like the image, you want to preserve it and just change that one little thing. Another thing that you can do as a little extra tip, if you're giving it an example of something or if you're trying to troubleshoot something and you want to give it a screenshot, when you do the screenshot, and this was one thing that Claude would do, would do it automatically, and it'd take a picture of the whole screen when maybe it just needed one little section, like not even, you know, a tenth of the screen. So what you do with a screenshot is take a screenshot of just the part that you want to share with AI. So it doesn't have to look at all of the image. That's not relevant at all, but just the piece that's relevant, give that to AI, and that will help you save credits too. So one thing you don't want to do is overcorrect and not give it enough information for whatever task you want, right? So we need to have a nice healthy balance. So if you have a long prompt, it's not automatically wasteful, right? Because you may need to explain something to AI so that it produces the output you want. A large file is not automatically a mistake either. If it's relevant, that's what's important. Is everything in that file relevant for what it needs to do? That's why I said skills are so helpful because when you're chatting back and forth and you're trying to figure out what the skill needs, AI will sift through all that and figure it needs this, it doesn't need that, and it creates that nice, nice lean prompt for you to create the skill. So research, advanced reasoning, multi-step work are worth the usage when the result requires them. So you want to make sure it's not doing extra work. If you want to do research, then you tell it you need to do research. You also want to provide some constraints. So if for some reason you need some ideas, you're ideating, let it know how many you need. Otherwise, AI has a way of just giving you tons and tons and tons of information that you've got to read through. Tell it I want three credible resources and I want the links and I want five suggestions. Give it parameters. Tell it how many you need because you're probably not going to need 30, right? You're not going to need 12. Maybe you just need three ideas, and then you can review those or maybe three resource links and you can review those. Otherwise, it'll give you lots of information. It'll search the internet, and you may not need all that information, and that's work it's doing, and it's using power to do that. So you want to make sure that everything that you do, especially ideation, you do in the chat. Don't go to the next step, which in chat GBT would be work. So if you're doing chat, you can do all the thinking, all the messy work, everything in there. And once you have it dialed in, then you can move on to the superpower, which is work in ChatGBT. And of course, Claude has co-work and there's other things that are very similar. They're just called different things, but they do the same type of thing. So the goal isn't necessarily a smaller prompt, the goal is to have the right amount for the job. Efficiency is not asking AI to do less, it's removing all of the stuff that really adds no value and just makes it work super, super hard. I used to tell people, you're not behind, you're not behind. But I'll tell you this in all honesty as a friend, now is a time to look at AI. And if ChatGBT is one that you've been using, because a lot of people started with ChatGBT and they didn't want to go ahead and add another subscription with Claude, ChatGBT has improved so much in its writing, in its image creation. I think it's number one. Remember back in the day, it used to be terrible with six fingers and one hand? It's not like that anymore. And it has so much of the workflow features that were before, just like in Claude. But now you can do so much. I mean, there's a lot there. And those are the kind of things that we are covering in our AI lab for solopreneurs. And this is my take on it. I don't want to teach something that would require a higher plan or more credits, because I don't know that solopreneurs even need all that power. A lot of times you hear people teach about AI and they say, oh, you can do all of this. Yeah, because they're working for a company that gives them a free full account and they have the higher level and they don't have to worry about credits. But the solopreneur, if they're going to do all that multi-workflows, you know, it could cost a pretty penny. So I want you to do workflows, but I want you to do it in a way that's not going to cost you a lot of credits. And there are ways to do that. So I have a complete list, a little guide of ways that you can conserve credits. And if you'd like that resource, it's totally free. And one of the things I would tell you right now, even if you don't grab the resource, is just go to the settings and be checking the usage. So when you're doing multi-step processes or you're creating workflows, or you're wondering, is this eating up credits and you're not sure? Just go to the settings, look at your credits, then go do your work at the end of the day, go back and look at your credits and see how much credits it required to do the work that you did when you have a work session. And that'll start giving you an idea and you get a feel for how many credits a certain task would use. Because when you start doing schedule tasks and other things, it will use credits. And if you reserve those credits for the really high-level stuff that you want done, uh, you're gonna have an awesome tool with just one tool that you pay what? ChatGPT is about 20 bucks. That's a pretty good deal, but you want to make sure you use those credits wisely. So, AI Lab, like I said, for solopreneurs, they're learning about all of this, and we're gonna continue with that. And I'm also gonna have a course in there that is going to review everything from Chat GPT from the beginning, from beginners to where we are right now. And I think if you haven't gotten on board, now is the time. The only thing you've missed in the past is all the release of a bunch of features, changing the dashboard and all the features, and now you can do this, and now we don't have this. You missed all that. So bravo. You don't have to deal with all the ups and downs and changes and here and there and nowhere. And now I think the dust is saddling myself. I think these tools are ready and there's not going to be tons of changes because that could be frustrating. So if you want to download the free guide, it's 12 ways to use AI more efficiently, and you simply go to learn dot marissa shadrick dot com forward slash AI usage. So that is learn L-E-A-R-N dot Marissa Shadrick, which is M-A-R-I-S-A-S-H-A-D-R-I-C-K dot com forward slash AI usage. A I U S A G E. And that resource should help you as you begin to use AI more to produce not only some amazing output, most of the things solopreneurs do, AI can do, but also to begin to set things up for workflows. And when you begin to get your foundational information all cleaned up and ready, you start building skills, guess what? You'll be ready for the next step, and that's workflows. So I hope this was helpful in just realizing that you can conserve your credits, and there are ways, and that document that I offered you is going to give you some more ways to save on credits so that you can get the most out of AI and get the most out of your day. So until next time, take care and I'll talk to you soon. Bye bye.