New releases: ChatGPT prompt, plain text mode

Free Blocks released a new ChatGPT prompt feature in its Google Workspace app yesterday. You now can input a prompt and Free Blocks will automatically pull down a response from ChatGPT where the request includes your prompt and free times. A picture is worth a thousand words:

Additionally, earlier in the year we exposed the option to share your free times as simply a bulleted list instead of a table:

These features seem to have nothing in common, so an explanation is in order to the question: what is the point of Free Blocks?

Previous posts have touched on this question a bit, but I want to try to answer this question more directly. I think the point of Free Blocks is to save you time at work. These time savings could be realized through:

• Writing emails / documents / text for you

• Prompting you to take specific value-add actions

• Working in the background on your behalf to book meetings, write documents, get feedback (ex. create and send out surveys) or market work (find the highest ROI work distribution channels (ex. Slack) and get the right context to co-workers at the right time)

Interestingly, all three of these bullet points have tons of applications in the ad tech world. Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Amazon Ads and other platforms will work tirelessly through analyzing troves of data to ensure the right ad is seen by the right audience at the right time. Agencies will write ads for you and are increasingly using AI-assisted technologies to create images and text. Finally, the aforementioned ad platforms have settings (many that come out of the box) that alert or somehow prompt you when your ads are suboptimal or could somehow be improved.

In the workplace, my feeling is that the equivalent tools are lagging behind ad tech. To be clear, the use cases aren’t exactly the same, but the workplace version of serving the right ad to the right audience at the right time might look like this:

In this example, the data that informs the right prompt to show is:

• Amy reviewing a Google Sheet

• Amy messaging Bob

The right prompt comes in the form of a reminder to edit a Google Sheet and schedule a meeting to review the edits. Free Blocks could go one step further here and:

• Make the edits based on data around Amy’s specific feedback and Bob’s OKR context (docs, code, JIRA tickets, meeting recordings, etc. from Bob)

• Schedule the meeting

In this way, Free Blocks could act both as a:

• “Clone” of you at work

• Your “eyes and ears” at work to get context where it normally would be hidden from you (ex. reading meeting transcripts for meetings you did not attend since you had another meeting at that time)

To do both jobs effectively, Free Blocks has to be able to write text and do other functions in a variety of ways. Features like writing through a ChatGPT prompt and offering many ways (table, plain text) of sharing info are baby steps toward this goal.