Give away lifehacks freely

I make it a point to share with my polytechnic students a new lifehack during every class lesson.

Yesterday, they were required to watch a YouTube video on the topic of counter-arguments and identify the key talking points.

Lifehack 1: I first showed them how to find the transcript section in YouTube, so they could extract the content without having to watch the video repeatedly.

Bonus Lifehack 2: After they had finished the exercise, I showed them how to use AI to enhance their research. I put the transcript of the video into ChatGPT and got it to summarize the key points. ChatGPT spat out a very nicely-formatted response in just a few seconds.

The students’ eyes widened but I also warned them not to trust ChatGPT or any AI tool wholly. “You have to watch and know the video content yourself! AI helps you to cut down on the manual work of extracting data, but you must be able to discern if the words AI generated are valid and accurate.”

One of the students was no longer paying attention to me, because she was busy applying the same lifehacks to another video for a different school subject. And that was a good thing, she was applying her new learning.

People often ask me what I really do these days. I also have to keep pondering on how to say it.

It’s easy and true to say that I work in communications and help people tell better stories through words and visuals.

What’s not so easy to explain is that I also love to help others “learn how to learn” and stimulate their lifelong learning. I want to help others reduce their workload and lead better lives, while also taking the right precautions to not overly rely on tech.

Anyway, I hope these lifehacks work for you too. Have a great day ahead!

(I generated this image in Midjourney AI, with the concept of someone taking a shortcut through a dense landscape).

This post originally appeared on LinkedIn.