Many great techies write newsletters, sharing personal stories, life-learnings, system designs, and more to help others grow in their careers.
"Originality" is a key trait of great writing, especially in the age of Gen AI, where anyone can create fake content. Thankfully, our brains can now (as of July 2024) distinguish original content from AI-generated. And that’s why only a few great tech writers stand out for their humane narratives.
Creating original content takes time and effort. Writers sacrifice family or leisure time to deliver valuable, authentic content. There is no replacement for that if you want to be a great writer.
However, once the original draft blessed with personal experiences is ready, writers still have to spend hell lot of time making an article “publish-ready” which includes:
researching data,
fixing grammar, adding images and emojis,
using SEO-optimized words,
ensuring simplicity and clarity, and much more.
Experienced writers use different AI tools to incorporate these in their original drafts, which is justified given the effort involved. But using those tools is costly and the process is cumbersome. For new writers, overcoming these challenges comes with experience and following best practices.
To ease out this process, I am openly sharing a custom GPT Workflow that I’ve created — “Tech & Leadership Newsletter GPT”. I'll demo it in today's newsletter. This tool helps content creators worldwide become more efficient and reduces friction for new writers in sharing their stories.
To access this GPT tool, all you need to do is subscribe to this newsletter for free. In the newsletter’s welcome email, you will have a personal link accessible to use this efficiency tool. Existing subscribers would get the link in a separate email as a freebie.
👋 Hey there, I am Gourav. I write about Engineering, Productivity, Thought Leadership, and the Mysteries of the mind!
This article is little different from my typical writings. However, it holds the power to enable Techies across the globe to share their stories in an efficient way.
Demo of using this tool
The tool is designed to be used as a workflow. The steps of the workflow are ordered to help:
draft an outline,
take-in original draft and iterate on ideas,
image creation and insertion
adding research data and stats
adding emojis
simplicity checks to make sure its grade 7 read
proof reading and final grammar checks
With that, let’s get started.
Kickstart using the tool
Once you have subscribed to the newsletter, you will have the link to the tool. On the onset, it will give you an intro message asking you details about your topic, theme, title and target audience.
You can ask it about the overall workflow before starting with the draft.
Start by sharing your idea!
Here you will provide some input points to the tool.
It will then ask you if you have an outline to share.
It can generate an outline for you as well if you don’t provide your own and ask it to create it for you.
It will then create an professional outline based on your rough ideas and inputs. Further, it will ask you for your initial draft.
Start Preparing the Draft
You can play around with surprises that GPT can give to you, aka, ask it to create draft for you. but I highly recommend creating your own draft with your own tone, structure, stories.
Below is just an example where GPT created the draft for you.
Here, I asked it to ignore its draft and rather take my draft.
Refine your draft
Then, it will tell you the next steps in the workflow.
It can create an AI image for you, if you want.
Then, it will can help you add some stats in your draft.
See example below:
Then, it will make sure the article is simple to grade 7 level and simple to read.
You can also ask it to add emojis at appropriate points in the next step.
Post a final review, it will make it publish ready with proof reading, consistency checks, etc.
Disclaimer
First, you would need GPT-4o subscription to use this tool for longer periods of time as free Open AI usage may have some limits.
Second, this GPT tool is solely my creation, refined over a few days to streamline workflow and integrate best practices for newsletter writing. I've incorporated insights from great reference articles and the personal style guides of various authors. However, it's important to note that this is still a GPT tool and may sometimes produce inaccurate or unexpected information. Please use it at your own discretion. It's designed to enhance your efficiency, not replace your creativity or judgment.
Shoutouts
How to Impress in High-Stakes Presentations by
From Staff Engineer at Meta to Y-Combinator Founder by
How the Fear of "Unknown" is Blocking your Growth by
Why perfectionism destroys your productivity, and what to do instead by
in collaboration with5 reasons why your best developers will quit - and how can you postpone it by
🤝 Let’s Connect
Sponsorship | Collaboration | LinkedIn | 1:1 Mentoring | Twitter
Gourav Khanijoe
Thanks for providing this tool. Masterpiece of prompt engineering. Just adding cherry on the cake, you can try some of the drafting in claude.ai 3.5 sonnet. I found it better than chatgpt for some drafting piece.
Noice. Love it. Thanks for sharing and the shoutout as well