10X your content career with AI? Here's one way

AI is overwhelming us, so let’s do something about it. Let’s learn how to use some of the most popular and readily-available tools to make you 10X more productive as a content professional.

Anthropic Claude, “The Go-To”

Claude is my primary and preferred editorial assistant. It reasons and handles complexity like a champ despite being a bit too nice at times (“You're absolutely right. That closing statement was filled with luxury travel clichés and added no real value for the reader.”)

Claude's superpower is Projects, which allows you to create memory-based workflows for practically anything. Each Project is like a closed-loop framework, or as Anthropic so gracefully calls it — “Avoid the cold start problem.”

This means you can set custom instructions and documentation around a project, and Claude will reference these in your conversation flow. It’s a game changer.

You can use Claude for a huge range of tasks including content production, advance data analysis, creating offers, auditing landing page copy, and more.

One small downside to Claude: it has a short context window, meaning it'll try to end your current conversation due to length limitations. This is a real buzzkill when you're down the rabbit hole talking to an AI.

OpenAI ChatGPT, “The Taskrabbit”

ChatGPT is the trusty but way overqualified taskrabbit (at least for me at the moment). It’s very handy for less intensive tasks like cleaning call transcripts, basic ideation, web searches, data parsing, and sometimes a second opinion from Claude.

I prefer models 4 and o1-mini for general and deeper thought inquiries, respectively. Thankfully the ChatGPT writing style has come a long way, dropping its overly upbeat voice in favor of clear, natural language.

ChatGPT is capable of so much more than low to mid-level tasks, but right now I prefer the UX and design experience of Claude.

Perplexity, “The Researcher”

Perplexity is the ultimate Google replacement because it aggregates many search results into a thoughtful answer to your query (hint: good answers require good questions).

Results are delivered instantly with citations, and with a paid Perplexity account, you get generous access to its Deep Research and DeepSeeks models, which can give you a massive advantage on going deeper into a an given topic.

TextMate, “The Public Utility”

When you work with LLMs, you end up working with abnormally large amounts of text. It’s good practice to use plain text to avoid formatting, bloating, and weird character issues. This is where a no-frill, lo-tech plain text editor is essential.

My favorite editor is TextMate (MacOS). I store and process all of my LLM data (both inputs and outputs) as markdown language in plain text files. I do this for consistency, faster processing, and less memory allocation. My AI team would be nowhere without TextMate.

Notion: “The Project Manager”

If you’re tracking projects, tasks, and timelines (who isn’t?) you’ll need to track them somewhere, preferably away from the dynamic and intense AI activity.

I use Notion for this and it’s also where I publish online my client-facing documents like proposals, outlines, specs, etc. Notion has a powerful database feature that allows you to store and view data in interesting ways. I also store nearly all my ideas, knowledge base, and free writing here.

Notion also has a super handy feature that lets you one-click publish and unpublish your Notion pages to the web, which I often do to show clients something with a limited viewing window.

You can read that Notion’s founder spent years in Japan studying product design — I can confirm this ethos is reflected in the minimalism and simplicity of the product.

A parting disclaimer

Just keep in mind these are only tools and not replacements for authenticity, empathy, or storytelling.