No fluff—just the actual ways to use ChatGPT daily to save 20+ hours a week as a working mom.
In this Toolkit Series episode of The New Modern Mom Podcast, I dive into the practical use cases of ChatGPT and how working parents can actually use it to reclaim time, reduce mental load, and bring more ease into their routines. Whether you’ve never touched ChatGPT or you’re already experimenting with AI tools, this episode is packed with real-life examples, mindset shifts, and smart ideas that make AI less intimidating—and a whole lot more helpful.
This isn’t just a tech episode. It’s a toolkit for thriving in modern parenthood. You'll hear honest reflections on overwhelm, personal use cases of how AI is showing up in real working-parent households, and a practical breakdown of how to use AI tools in ways that feel realistic, approachable, and supportive.
Download my free ChatGPT guide!
Looking for a breakdown of how I actually use ChatGPT in my daily life? I’ve created something for you: 5 Practical Ways to Use ChatGPT: A Working Mom’s Guide. This free guide walks you through the 5 ways I use ChatGPT every single day to lighten the mental load. Think of it like hiring an assistant… for free.
🧠 Simplify your mental load with AI
This episode opens with why AI isn’t just for people who love tech—it’s for overwhelmed working parents looking to reclaim time, reduce decision fatigue, and feel more in control of their day-to-day. I share how ChatGPT can be seamlessly woven into your personal routines.
“We have this incredible free tool at our fingertips that should be implemented in almost every single process that you do daily. You can think of ChatGPT as an assistant, a member of your team, or a thought partner. I’m a constant optimizer, and this is one of the most valuable tools I’ve added to my day. It helps me squeeze more out of every hour.”
✉️ Use ChatGPT as your email assistant
From school follow-ups to business updates, I share how she no longer writes emails from scratch. Instead, she uses ChatGPT to streamline communication, clarify tone, and reduce unnecessary back-and-forth.
“I’m not exaggerating when I say I don’t write emails anymore. I want to deliver the clearest, most efficient message possible, and ChatGPT helps me do just that. Whether I’m editing tone or creating a message from bullet points, this tool saves me so much time. I give it the context, and it gives me a professional, kind, and effective message.”
🏡 Delegate home management tasks to ChatGPT
Managing a home support team can be time-consuming, but ChatGPT can help create onboarding documents, daily checklists, and task breakdowns in a clear, approachable way. I show how this tool also acts as a thought partner for better delegation.
“I use ChatGPT to create checklists and onboarding docs that are easy to follow—even when English isn’t someone’s first language. I upload a job description, give it some context, and ask it to organize the info in a table format. It helps me communicate clearly and think through what else I could delegate. This has been a game-changer at home.”
📊 Let ChatGPT take on admin at work
I explain how I leverage ChatGPT for everything from team management to contract drafting and pitch deck refinement. It's about turning the chaos of entrepreneurship into structured, scalable systems.
“Whether it’s giving feedback, recapping a one-on-one, or drafting a new NDA, ChatGPT helps me move faster and stay aligned with my team. It’s like having a junior strategist at my fingertips. I’ve even used it to rework decks to improve flow and clarity. This tool is deeply integrated into how I operate my businesses.”
🛠️ Train ChatGPT to sound just like you
To get the most from ChatGPT, it needs to sound like you. I walk through how to craft effective prompts in the free version or create your own GPT to write in your unique voice, tone, and style.
“My biggest pet peeve is when something sounds like it was written by ChatGPT. This tool can get you 80% of the way there, but you need to add your final polish. The best thing you can do is train it to match your tone—whether that’s through ultra-specific prompts or by building your own GPT chatbot. The result is content that feels like you wrote it yourself.”
If you’ve been curious about how AI fits into your life as a working parent—or if you’ve ever wished for just a little more time and a little less chaos—this episode is a must-listen. Tune in and walk away with tools, prompts, and mindset shifts you can start using today.
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And don't forget to download my free guide: 5 Practical Ways to Use ChatGPT: A Working Mom’s Guide
Rather read the full interview than listen?
[00:00:00] Barbara Mighdoll: Hi everyone. Welcome to the toolkit series from the new Modern Mom podcast. I'm thrilled to bring you this bonus series in between seasons. Each episode will be a quick, actionable deep dive into some of the most important themes from season one. My goal is to help you build the tools you need so they're ready and waiting in your toolkit, the ones you're going to reach for to calm the chaos of career and motherhood. [00:00:21] Barbara Mighdoll: So let's get started. [00:00:22] Barbara Mighdoll: Today we are talking about the theme of productivity. answering the question personally I get all the time, which is how do you do it all? I have optimized most of my processes to do with my personal life and my business so that I can get more done in the day. [00:00:39] Barbara Mighdoll: And a lot of that is driven by my use of chat, GBT. so today We are going to go through real life examples of how a very active working parent can and should be using chat think about how to squeeze more out of my day all the time. I am a constant optimizer for good or bad, and [00:01:00] that's honestly really how I got started leveraging and experimenting with Chachi. [00:01:04] Barbara Mighdoll: Bt, we have this incredible free tool at our fingertips that. Should be implemented in almost every single process that you do daily. [00:01:14] Barbara Mighdoll: You can think of Chatt PT as an assistant. You can think of it as a member of your team, and you can think of it as a thought partner to help you improve your day-to-day life. [00:01:23] Today I am going to walk you through the four major areas of my daily life that I use, Chatt, BT writing emails, helping manage my support team at home, optimizing my work for new modern mom and MNT and troubleshooting life moments. So let's dive in. [00:01:37] Barbara Mighdoll: The first is writing emails. I am not exaggerating when I say I do not write emails anymore, and it's not because I'm lazy or because I don't know how to write. It's because I want to deliver the most clear, actionable, efficient message to whoever I'm emailing to reduce the back and forth communications. [00:01:54] Barbara Mighdoll: Which in turn further optimizes my own time. So there are a couple different ways that you can [00:02:00] use this tool for email writing. The simplest form is editing an existing email. So you write an email and then you want to improve that email for conciseness, maybe for tone of voice. [00:02:12] Barbara Mighdoll: And I have found Leveraging Chat, TPT in my email writing process to really help the tone. And so I love writing an email, giving it to this tool and asking it to. Be overly kind, or if I am really wanting to deliver some feedback and I'm wanting it to really hit home in a particular way, maybe I want it to be more stern or more disappointed in tone. [00:02:35] Barbara Mighdoll: So Itcan be extremely helpful if you're trying to improve the efficiencies of your communication with somebody else. Then the other way that you can use it is to write an email completely from scratch. [00:02:45] Barbara Mighdoll: And this is honestly where I have now leaned into this tool more. It started off by like, let me edit this email, and then I figured out over time how to quickly and efficiently get the bullet point thoughts down on paper that I need, and then give [00:03:00] that with enough context to this tool to then write an entire email for me. [00:03:04] Barbara Mighdoll: So some examples of this that are extremely practical that you may need is how to best ask for an introduction from a former boss or a colleague, whether you're trying to network or land a new job. So you can literally Ask it to help you write a professional yet warm email to reconnect with a former boss or colleague that you haven't spoken to in a while. [00:03:25] Barbara Mighdoll: You can tell it the goal of the email. Is it because you are genuinely just trying to. Reignite an old connection. Are you trying to share a personal update with them so that they can be bought into your journey? Are you wanting to ask them for a favor? You tell the tool the tone that you want. Is it friendly, but respectful? [00:03:43] Barbara Mighdoll: Is it confident but humble you ask it to avoid? Sounding transactional. You also tell it how many words to keep it to. Usually for emails I recommend under 200 words, then you kind deliver a couple bullet points of like the elements that you want it to include. That is how I [00:04:00] leverage this tool for email writing, which is likely my most common day-to-day use case. [00:04:05] Barbara Mighdoll: The second way I use it is to help manage my support team at home. So whether I am hiring somebody a need to create onboarding documents for them, or I am wanting to. Build checklists to make sure that certain things are getting done in the way that I want 'em to get done. I love leveraging Chachi BT to kind of create these onboarding documents or these checklists or tables for me, and it also helps me as a thought partner think through what else could I ask this person to be doing? [00:04:33] Barbara Mighdoll: Some tips that I will throw out for this type of support is often giving it job description, so uploading documents of that person's role and responsibilities. Asking it to clearly format information in tables so that you can easily copy and paste that into a document. And I often want to leverage. [00:04:54] Barbara Mighdoll: Its capabilities of communicating clearly and concisely because a lot of my at home team, [00:05:00] English is not their first language, so I really wanna make sure that the points I'm trying to get across come across clearly and are understood effectively. [00:05:08] Barbara Mighdoll: The third bucket is actually doing my work for new modern mom and m and t studio. So there's a couple sub buckets that I'll put under here so you can start ideating and getting your own ideas of how you can leverage this for your own jobs. So the first is team management, [00:05:24] Barbara Mighdoll: very similar to the last bucket. I love leveraging Chachi BT to help manage my team, and that comes in the form of. how to best deliver feedback. How to make sure that we are aligned on what the priorities should be based off of overall company objectives, helping summarize one-on-ones and create action items for what needs to happen next after that one-on-one. [00:05:47] Barbara Mighdoll: I have found this to be such an incredible tool in holding myself and my team accountable for deliverables. [00:05:53] Barbara Mighdoll: Another fun bucket, which I think is very applicable no matter what your role is, is I leverage chat GBT for [00:06:00] contracts in sows or any type of agreements that need to take place. So whether I am creating a new statement of work for a client [00:06:08] Barbara Mighdoll: Or whether we are hiring somebody new and we need a new NDA to sign. I asked chat GBT to help build that. And then another very effective tool is to help you edit presentations and decks so you can prompt. Review the attached deck created for a specific audience regarding a specific goal, and you can ask it to suggest edits to the order for narrative flow, for the actual content, for clarity and conciseness. [00:06:36] Barbara Mighdoll: You can ask it to help you highlight what specific metrics should be added to slides. You can ask it to edit the tone to make sure it is coming off as professional yet approachable. [00:06:46] Barbara Mighdoll: There are just so many applications to your day-to-day tasks at work, and I really urge you to think through what are those buckets of work that you are constantly doing that maybe you could dabble with cha GBT and [00:07:00] asking it, how could I improve this? [00:07:02] Barbara Mighdoll: The next bucket, which I have been leaning on very heavily is public speaking and content creation. So we spoke in a previous episode about the power of building your own personal brand, and this is the secret to how you can fit this into your day. [00:07:19] Barbara Mighdoll: And I am gonna give you a real life example for something that isn't even necessarily a huge investment in your personal brand, but something you should absolutely be doing on LinkedIn, which is sharing your accomplishments so you can ask. This tool to help you write a LinkedIn post announcing a recent product launch. [00:07:36] Barbara Mighdoll: You can tell it what the tone should be. You can ask it to include some specific value props of what that product is. You can give it a couple anecdotes of your experience in building that product, or the impact that it's having that you're witnessing. [00:07:50] Barbara Mighdoll: You can ask it to include specific people and collaborators on that product, and then of course you can ask it for recommendations on how to invite the audience to [00:08:00] engage to increase the reach of that post. use case is if you are starting to speak on podcasts or events, or maybe you're the spokesperson for your company, leverage Chat GPT to build out your speaking points for any speaking engagement you have. [00:08:16] Barbara Mighdoll: you just need to give the tool an outline of interview questions. supporting documents like a press release that you're speaking to, or anything that's been written about the product or service that you are working on, and ask it to write the responses. [00:08:31] Barbara Mighdoll: Then work with it to improve those responses. Insert this personal anecdote here, or insert this five point, step-by-step framework I would recommend here. This is such a powerful tool in cutting the prep work time for any type of speaking, and I cannot speak more highly about being able to leverage this to improve the output of anything you're working on related to speaking. [00:08:54] Barbara Mighdoll: And the last piece is troubleshooting daily moments, and that could be anything throughout your [00:09:00] day, whether you don't know what to cook at night, you've got ground Turkey, zucchini, and pasta. Or something to do with your kids if you are looking for creative activities for a 5-year-old and a 2-year-old to do together using household items. [00:09:14] Barbara Mighdoll: Or if you're planning a birthday party like I am right now, what does a face painter cost in San Francisco? And then another real life example of something I had to do two weeks ago, my car wouldn't start, and so I went to chat GBT instead of Google to help troubleshoot. I asked it, how long does a car battery last in my type in year of make of my car? [00:09:35] Barbara Mighdoll: Then I asked, how do you jumpstart my type of car? And then I was having this flashing light on my dashboard. I said, diagnose the issue with my car. This light is on. It saved me [00:09:45] Barbara Mighdoll: a call to aaa. It saved me a trip to the dealership all just by having a one-to-one dialogue with it for the course of five minutes. [00:09:54] Barbara Mighdoll: So what is a tangible tool you can add into your toolkit to start experiencing [00:10:00] the magic of the efficiencies that come from using chat GBT in your daily life? The tool is how to train chat, CBT to sound exactly like you. [00:10:09] Barbara Mighdoll: My biggest , and I mean biggest pet peeve with anyone, whether it is a content creator I'm following, or somebody on my team, I literally warn every single person who works for me about this. And that is if. The product or output that you are delivering sounds like it was written by chat GPT. This tool can get you 80% of the way there if you prompt it extremely well, but you must give it another 20% human correction to be in a finalized state. [00:10:38] Barbara Mighdoll: That said, the best thing you can do upfront, and this is your tool for today, is create a prompt or train your very own GPT to sound like you. So I'm going to give you two options The first option is if you're using the free product. The second option is if you are using the paid product, [00:11:00] which honestly I highly recommend you pay for, it's $20 a month and you can create your own. [00:11:05] Barbara Mighdoll: Chat bot that stores all of the information for you related to your own POVs, your experiences, your preferences, your tone of voice. But if you're like, I don't wanna commit, I just wanna test this out, I'm also going to give you a really great option to do that. So let's start there. If you are not paying and you just wanna create the most. [00:11:24] Barbara Mighdoll: Specific prompt that you can copy and paste. So, open up a word doc. Get ready to write this prompt, and you will just copy and paste this prompt every single time. You wanna ask cha GBT to respond to something that is in your own personal brand tone and voice. I, [00:11:37] Barbara Mighdoll: so you're always going to start by saying that you are writing in the voice of your name, and then you need like a short one to two liner description of yourself. You also want to come up with three words to describe your tone, whether that's concise, empathetic, friendly, positive, optimistic. Then you also want to come up with three words that describe the feeling you want to make [00:12:00] someone have when they are reading or listening to any of this content that's being produced by Chachi BT. So those words could be warm, seen, supported, heard, figure out what that is, and write that down. Then you wanna remind this tool to write like you're talking to a friend. [00:12:15] Barbara Mighdoll: You want it to keep sentences and paragraphs short, simple, and relatable. Then you wanna identify your core values. Give it six core values. These could be words or short phrases that describe your attitude towards life. So for me, as an example, one of my core values is design your own life. Another core value of mine is take calculated risks. [00:12:37] Barbara Mighdoll: So you kind of wanna give it these values so that it understands your perspective and your approach to anything that you're asking it to write. Then this is a must. Identify how you want emojis to be used, never, often sparingly. Be specific here. And then you're gonna come up with two lists. One is a do this list and one is an avoid. [00:12:57] Barbara Mighdoll: list. A do. This list may [00:13:00] be use sensory language that bring experiences to life, like feel this or. Melt away Another do this may be [00:13:08] Barbara Mighdoll: encourage people to engage and take in action on your avoid list. You may have. Avoid aggressive sales language. [00:13:16] Barbara Mighdoll: Or no overly complicated technical explanations. Keep things simple and relatable. Okay, that is. The context part of this prompt. Now we're gonna move on to the actual prompt that will drive an action. So you are then going to start by providing a description of what you want written. [00:13:36] Barbara Mighdoll: So now please write a email. Three part series, Instagram message, LinkedIn, post phone script, blog, post event, invite, you name it. Two, insert the audience in. That needs to be ultra specific, so include demographics, whether it's a member or a new client, or followers, or. A zip code in your city. Then you're going to identify what [00:14:00] the goal is of this. [00:14:01] Barbara Mighdoll: Is the goal to invite them to an event? Is it to ask somebody to partner with you? Is it to generate excitement? And then you are going to insert key points to include in the content. So a long list of bulleted points, as much as you need to get your ideas out on paper. And that is the prompt. So that is something that you just need to write down, save in a Google document and copy and paste it for every single time you want a written output. [00:14:27] Barbara Mighdoll: My entire team has this prompt and. Has all of the descriptors and the words to use so that they themselves can sound like the brand or sound like me no matter what kind of output they are working on. [00:14:38] Barbara Mighdoll: Now, option two is building your own GPT. and you start this process on the backend of creating your own chat bot. I'm gonna give you four steps to think about to follow while you are creating this. [00:14:50] Barbara Mighdoll: The first is you need to narrate your POV to the chat bot. Creator, and that includes sharing emails that you've written, sharing captions that [00:15:00] you've written, actually narrating something to it. Like, explain how X, Y, or Z works for your company, or just narrate anything about your life, things that it should know. [00:15:12] Barbara Mighdoll: I'm a mom. I live in San Francisco. I've got a Bernie's Mountain dog. And then just start reflecting on your day. Tell it about what you did that day. What was on your agenda? Who did you meet with? What is troubling you? Why didn't you sleep well at night? Give it as much as you can. The second step here is to give it samples of your work and ask it to use these as the baseline data to match your style. [00:15:36] Barbara Mighdoll: So you've narrated, you've given it your work. [00:15:39] Barbara Mighdoll: You then ask it to describe your voice back to you, take what it gives you, and then move on to step three. And step three is actually defining your voice. So you want a few things documented and shared with this chat bot you just worked on having it to tell you what It thinks your tone of voice, but you now need to repeat it back in exactly how you want it to [00:16:00] sound. [00:16:00] Barbara Mighdoll: So what is your tone? Is it confident? Is it clear? Is it warm? Is it bold? You then wanna give it phrases that you use a lot, like, let's be real, or This changed everything. Or TLDR. You wanna give it words or phrases you hate? Game changer. Mom, boss, mama. Just because, and then you want to give it what your audience should feel. [00:16:23] Barbara Mighdoll: Do you want them to feel seen, inspired, like they're texting a friend? Once you do that, ask it to co-create a mini voice guide for you. [00:16:32] Barbara Mighdoll: Look at what it gives, ensure it is exactly what you want, and then ask it to save that in its knowledge base. And then the last part is an ongoing commitment , and that is continuously giving it feedback as you go. The number one way to improve your chat bot over time is to give it feedback. You can say what worked, what didn't work, or what felt off, and then you can also continue to suggest a word or phrase that you want to use instead. [00:16:56] Barbara Mighdoll: I am constantly learning about how to [00:17:00] integrate AI into my daily life, and I know it may feel overwhelming if you've never tested this or you're still kind of using chat CBT as an alternative tool for Google , I want you to remember that you really just need to jump in and experiment with it This isn't a subject you can just read about and listen about on podcasts and suddenly understand it. You will not understand it fully until you start getting your hands dirty in this tool. So whether you are a complete newbie or ready to step your game, I highly, highly, highly recommend figuring out what are those buckets in your day that you want to start testing and just go for it. [00:17:37] Barbara Mighdoll: I know I covered a lot today, and I do have a downloadable guide that you can access. Just go to the show notes and you can get your hands on everything that we talked about today in written form. Alright. Thanks for tuning in to this toolkit series on the new Modern Mom podcast. [00:17:54] Barbara Mighdoll: I hope today's tips help simplify the chaos of career and motherhood one tool at a time. if you found [00:18:00] this episode helpful, don't forget to subscribe. Give a five star rating and leave a review. You can always connect with me on LinkedIn. Follow new water, mom on Instagram and subscribe to my newsletter. [00:18:10] Barbara Mighdoll: I would seriously love to hear from you. My dms are always open and I wanna know if this toolkit was helpful. Your support means so much as I continue my mission to help more moms find work life fulfillment. Until next time.Author
