ChatGPT Shortcuts for Writers
You don’t need more content; you need smarter systems to reuse what you’ve already created.
In this podcast episode, I’m sharing five practical ChatGPT shortcuts that help me write faster, stay organized, and spark fresh ideas from existing content.
These are the exact methods I use when writing my book and producing weekly assets for my business.
Whether you’re a coach, speaker, service provider, or author, you’ll walk away with time-saving ways to turn scattered ideas into polished, purpose-driven content.
ChatGPT can become a creative collaborator without losing your voice in the process.
What You’ll Discover in This Episode:- Why your creative “mess” isn’t a problem, it’s a content goldmine
- How ChatGPT’s “Branching” feature lets you work on multiple assets at the same time!
- The hidden shortcut to search your own content library inside ChatGPT
- How “Canvas” mode helps you edit content directly in ChatGPT
- A repeatable workflow to repurpose an article into a podcast, newsletters, YouTube videos, and more.
- How to organize your ChatGPT threads with “Projects.”
- The command that reveals every ChatGPT shortcut available
Key Takeaways:
- Use ChatGPT’s branch feature to spin off checklists, citations, and additional assets from the same core idea without losing your place.
- The search feature searches your entire prompt history, so you don’t rewrite what you already wrote.
- Canvas mode allows you to make micro-edits inside ChatGPT. No copy/paste needed.
- Projects or folders keep repurposing ideas organized for newsletters, LinkedIn, podcasts, and more.
- You don’t lose creativity by using AI—you gain clarity and momentum.
Quotes to Remember:
- “You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, just reuse what you’ve already created in seconds.”
- “ChatGPT doesn’t care if you babble. It’ll help you structure what you’re trying to say.”
- “The clearer your ideas become, the more momentum you build.”
Your Next Step:
AI Lab for Solopreneurs Feeling like content creation for marketing takes too much time?
That’s why I created AI Lab for Solopreneurs, a private membership where you can learn, implement, and grow with AI in real time.
- Live Coaching & Demos: Monthly hands-on sessions to learn AI strategies that fit your business goals.
- Resource Library: Access a growing collection of guides and templates you can use right away.
- Custom GPTs: Exclusive access to ready-to-use AI assistants that save time and improve content quality.
- 24/7 Support: Get your questions answered anytime inside the private community.
Join AI Lab for Solopreneurs today and lock in your $37/month founding rate before it increases.
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Marisa Shadrick :If You’ve been using ChatGPT for writing your first drafts, you’re going to love this episode. I’m going to share five helpful shortcuts you can use today to write and repurpose content. Stay tuned. Got the solo business blues wearing too many hats? Stay tuned for an episode that understands where you’re at. From burnout to breakthrough. We’ll rewrite your story with AI and strategy. Let’s amplify your authority. Hello everyone, and welcome to the podcast Amplify youy Authority.
Marisa Shadrick :I’m your host, Marissa Shadrick. I’m an AI marketing strategist and certified copywriter. And today we’re going to talk to the writers in the world, those of you that are writing articles, that are maybe writing a book, that write blog posts. And I’m going to share with you five tips that will help you in your writing process. If you use ChatGPT. Now, if you just started using ChatGPT yesterday, yesterday, maybe some of these tips won’t be helpful. But I guarantee some of these will be. So stay with me as I share these five quick strategies and see if it works for you.
Marisa Shadrick :So if you find yourself as a writer that your best content is scattered everywhere, that was me, right? I have content on podcasts, I have it in articles, I have it in blog posts and newsletters, on YouTube channel. It is everywhere. And then I’ve got those documents in Google Drive. You know, you get to a point year after year writing content that’s all scattered and you can’t really sort it. But I’ve been using ChatGPT for almost three years now. And so there’s a lot of content, there’s a lot of information inside of ChatGPT that I have archived. In other words, it’s not front and center for me to look at because that’s just too much information when I’m creating things. But it’s archived on the back end of ChatGPT.
Marisa Shadrick :But you can always bring it back to the forefront if you need it for. For something that maybe you’re going to repurpose. But today I’m going to talk about all of the creation, all of the work that you do inside of ChatGPT. Can you reuse it? So what I decided to do is double down. And I’m really a promoter of focusing on one AI tool first and then as you continue, you can use other tools if that’s going to serve you well and serve your clients. So I use ChatGPT more for the ideation, for copywriting, for first drafts, Some people like other platforms for writing, but I don’t tell AI to write the entire article. I am very closely directing it from the introduction paragraph all the way down to the bullets, all the way down to the last closing paragraph. I am explaining what I’m trying to do at each stage.
Marisa Shadrick :So ChatGPT helps me structure it, it helps me with transitions, it helps tell me where my weaknesses are, it asks me questions where maybe I have missed the mark and maybe I haven’t explained something very well so it becomes a collaborator. Now when it comes to final draft, if I’m using for social media or if I’m using it for a quick newsletter, it has improved quite a bit since its release. In the beginning it was very academic sounding, very AI ish, It wasn’t conversational. But I have trained mine through the to write like me. I have given it knowledge, my voice, tone, style. I’ve also given it my personality assessments so it could use in some cases self deprecating humor just to lighten up the content. And it has learned how to write like me and so AI has improved quite a bit. So ChatGPT has become better at narratives, but some people prefer other platforms like Gemini or Claude and that’s fine to finish and polish up.
Marisa Shadrick :I’m even going to try some of these for the final draft of my book and just compare and see what I like best. But I typically talk to ChatGPT and I just totally share my heart in audio form. So I click the little microphone and I just talk to it. I’m trying to explain the situation, how I felt, and use all of the senses to explain what I saw, what I heard, what I felt, even what I tasted or smelled so it understands the scenario. And then I explain where my audience is at and how I want to come alongside and help them. So I give it a lot of narrative when I’m writing the prompt, but I do this in audio form because I can just close my eyes and just share. Some might say it’s Babel, but Chat GPT doesn’t care. If you just go on a rant or you babble, it will organize all of that and it will understand what you’re trying to do.
Marisa Shadrick :So now I’m going to share some tips. I haven’t even gotten to the tips yet. I’m going to share some tips that have been really helpful for me. Five of them. For those of you who are writers, I’m speaking to writers now. Technically I would say all of you are writers, even if you’re on YouTube or you’re podcasting. Because everything starts with writing. Everything starts with writing.
Marisa Shadrick :You write something and then you modify it for video or for a podcast. In fact, this particular podcast episode is from a training I did inside my AI lab for solopreneurs private membership. Of course. I went deeper with demos, and I went behind the scenes with ChatGPT and showed my members how to use this. And I took a few of the tips that I shared inside my membership, and I’m sharing it with you today free of charge. You’re welcome. And so Here are the five tips. The first one is that ChatGPT allows you to branch.
Marisa Shadrick :Yes, you heard me right. Just like a tree branch, it allows you to branch. And when you think of a tree, you’ve got the main trunk and then you’ve got these little branches, right? And it all makes up the tree. Well, if you think of a branch, that way you can have your core chat with the content that you’re writing. But if you think, oh, my goodness, you know what, I forgot to research something. But I don’t want to take the time to have it research right here in this chat thread, because I’m working and that takes a long time to research, and then it’s going to stop my flow. So you can actually branch. And here’s where you find it.
Marisa Shadrick :At the end of the output in your chat, you’re going to see three little dots, and if you click it, you will see the option to branch. And what it does, it creates a new chat. But here’s the magic. It creates a new chat with all the information that you’ve already generated in the copy or the duplicate chat. So it’s not going to affect the original. It’s going to create a clone a copy of it. And in that copy you can say, I want you to do deep research. And you can select deep research, you can select web, and you have it working behind the scenes while you go back and you continue with your writing.
Marisa Shadrick :So I found it really helpful. So here are some examples of things that you can do with the branch. You can branch so you’re making a copy of it. And in that branch you can say, create all the citations, do a research and find all the citations for this article. Or you can say branch and you can say, I want to create a text image prompt that I want to use on another platform for this article. Let it work and do its thing. Or if you want to create a simple checklist or a summary or cheat sheet for that particular blog or article that you’re writing, you can branch and say, create a simple checklist for this article and let it do its thing. And in the meantime, you’re still working on the original.
Marisa Shadrick :It makes it super easy. While it’s top of mind, create a branch and have it create these other assets that are going to go with the original. So just like a tree, your original is like your trunk, and then the branch or all the other things, the other assets that you want to create, that’s going to go with the original content. So I found branch to be very, very helpful. Number two, as far as shortcuts, I love this one. I don’t know if it’s happened to you, but sometimes I think, did I write this already? And if I did, where did I put this? Was it a YouTube video? Was it a podcast? Was it in a newsletter? Was it on LinkedIn? Because you can repurpose, but you don’t want to repurpose on the same platform where you originally shared it. So you can go into ChatGPT. And since I use ChatGPT to organize, to ideate, and to create kind of a structure and first draft, there’s a lot in there, you know, for after three years, almost three years, there’s a lot of content in there.
Marisa Shadrick :So here’s what you can do. If you’re trying to write something and say it’s on leadership, or maybe it’s on hard skills, and you’re trying to see, where else did I talk about this? You can go into ChatGPT and here’s what you’re going to do inside the thread where you’re at. If you’re on Mac, Command K, or if you’re on PC, Control K to search for past prompts or outputs instantly. So it will populate, begin to populate right in front of you. When you hit either Command K on Mac or Control K on PC, it will take just a second and it will begin to show you all the titles of the threads that you talked about that particular topic. And you can go up and down and scroll and you can open one to see, oh, that was part of a podcast that I did. Or you can scroll and go, oh, I think I talked about this in my newsletter to my email list, but I never shared it on social media or vice versa. I shared this on LinkedIn, but I never shared it with my community.
Marisa Shadrick :So you can begin to see where you can repurpose things. Or maybe take that content and if you’re going to write a book, maybe that content that’s already written can be something you put inside of a chapter. So I love this function because I’m a scatterbrain at times. When I’m in creative mode, everything’s flying, it’s everywhere. And so I can use this function key the shortcut and it’ll show me where. I have talked about this and written about this, so I’m not reinventing the wheel. I love this feature. It’s a time saver.
Marisa Shadrick :Let me tell you. Number three, if you are writing, make sure you don’t just copy and paste in a Google Doc and do all your edits, because you might need to still do some research or other things and use some of the functionality that Chat GBT offers. So ask it if it didn’t do it already, and if you didn’t prompt it this way, ask it to give you the output in Canvas mode so that you can edit inside of ChatGPT. Usually I do this in the initial prompt when I’m asking it to give me the structure or outline. I ask it to provide the output in Canvas mode so I can do some personal edits. So what will happen is it will produce all of the content in something that looks like a box. At the very top right of the box, there’s a little area that says edit. You click edit and the box opens up and you’re able to literally make changes right there inside of ChatGPT.
Marisa Shadrick :You just highlight the change. Now, here’s the beautiful part. You might be thinking, well, I could still do that without Canvas mode, but it’s going to rewrite everything and make that thread so long. And here you can just highlight one or two sentences or maybe a paragraph and say, this doesn’t really explain what I was trying to convey. Let’s rewrite it. And you could put anything you want. So when you highlight it, you’ll see where it opens up a little window for ChatGPT to get more information from you, more feedback from you. And you type in there.
Marisa Shadrick :And what it will do is rewrite those sentences or that paragraph only so you’re not having it produce everything. It’s a real time saver. And it’s a great way to collab with AI as well. So that’s called Canvas and that allows you to edit inside of Chat GPT. Now, for some reason you did this and maybe the whole output was just not right. It’s like, oh, this is not the direction that I wanted. I was not clear enough. You can always go back to the original prompt and you’ll see a little pencil and you can change the original prompt, you will lose what was produced, but it will be able to give you better output because your prompt is going to be better.
Marisa Shadrick :Maybe you realize I really didn’t give it context. I really didn’t explain what I wanted. Let me rephrase this. Go to the pencil, change that prompt and that way it has a clean prompt and you’re not confusing it with prompts that were wrong or with tons of text that’s being outputted and long, long chats. You’re keeping it very clean. Okay, number four, once you’re creating this content, sometimes it’s really cool to use it for something else. Now, for example, if you’re writing something and say you’re writing about leadership and you think, oh wow, these points are really good. In this article, I think I should do a podcast about this.
Marisa Shadrick :You can branch and in that copy you can change the name of that chat. And I always do this with all the clones. I change the name and I’d say it’s a clone or I give it something that I can identify that it was a copy. So I never lose the original or get confused. And I can put in it podcast idea, for example. And so now it has all the information about the article that I want to repurpose it as a podcast. And so what I do is I take that chat with that article that I’m now going to turn into a podcast and then I click the little dots and you’re going to see on the left hand side where you see the list of chats, you’re going to see three dots and what you can do when you click it, you’ll see add to project. And I would recommend having a project for your social media.
Marisa Shadrick :Have a project for YouTube, if you’re on YouTube, have a project for LinkedIn. It’s just a place to work on ideas. So I have one for LinkedIn ideas, I have one for my newsletter, I have one for my podcast ideas, I have one for a magazine that I’m going to be writing some articles. And so I have it there and I put all my ideas in that folder because maybe I’m not ready to work on it right now. So I put all my ideas in there. So once I’m ready I can go to that folder, podcast ideas and I can open up that chat and now I can have a conversation with ChatGPT and talk about how I want to repurpose this article into a podcast. And so I give it all of the variables, I clean up the structure, I ask it what can I do to be able to make it more engaging for podcasts? Because podcasts are only audio. So this is what I did for this episode.
Marisa Shadrick :This was a segment from our AI lab for solopreneurs private membership. And I pulled a few of the tips and I branched it because I had all my notes in ChatGPT and I put podcast ideas. I put it in the folder, then I cleaned it up and decided which ideas I was going to share with you today. And then once I have that core content, then I went into my custom GPT, my podcast producer, and it will ask me two questions. Are we creating the talking points for your podcast? Are we creating the show notes? So I give it all the content that I have already fleshed out and it gives me a beautiful structure with keywords, everything that I need, because it’s already been programmed for podcasts. So that’s the workflow and the beauty of taking a chat that you have, branching it, making a copy of it and using it for something else. So hopefully that was clear for you. It’s a great way of creating your own workflows because everybody’s business is different.
Marisa Shadrick :But I want to give you a case study of how I’m using it as I’m writing my book, but also taking little bits of information from either my private membership or maybe something I produced on YouTube and repurposing it and adding to it, or subtracting from it or giving more examples, depending on what the platform is. The final tip I have for you is how to view all the shortcuts. Now, these shortcuts are kind of like function keys. I don’t know if you’ve been on computers long enough, but back in the day we use function keys all the time. Command this, shift that, and ChatGPT has this functionality and you can see what’s available inside of ChatGPT. So when you’re inside of ChatGPT, at any point, you can just hit control forward slash. So that’s the slash that’s kind of leaning toward the right. So control forward slash.
Marisa Shadrick :And you’ll see a little window pop up on the left hand side and it gives you all the commands. And you can see what’s available in ChatGPT. If you don’t see it for whatever reason, you can always go to the bottom left where you see your image icon and you can click that and you go over to where it says help. When you click Help, you’ll see more options and you’ll see keyboard shortcuts. So you go to your profile. On the bottom left, you see your image, you click it, you click help, and then you click keyboard shortcuts. And it’ll show you all of the shortcuts. Let me just leave you with a little word of encouragement.
Marisa Shadrick :As you’re using AI for your creativity, for your content creation, it doesn’t have to sound robotic, it doesn’t have to sound like AI. If you use these tools well and you begin by just sharing initially your heart of what you’re trying to convey, it’s going to learn, it’s going to adapt to your style, and it’s going to sound more like you. You creativity doesn’t disappear when you get organized or you leverage AI. It actually expands your opportunities and gives you more time for other things like serving clients. The clearer your ideas become, the more momentum you build. The brilliance about all of this is that you’re using content that you’ve already created. Your transcripts, your half written drafts, and ChatGPT is just helping you organize it, bring it back to visibility, or help you repurpose it for another platform. So if your best ideas are scattered right now, that’s okay, that’s okay, that’s normal.
Marisa Shadrick :Especially for creatives, that’s normal. Start from where you are, start sorting using ChatGPT, start shaping, and you’ll be amazed at what that’s already available for future writing. So I hope this was helpful for you. I am really honored and so glad you’re listening to this podcast and if you would like to leave a rating and review, I’ve made it super easy. I’m going to post it in the show notes. I have a little video to show you how you can leave a five star rating and review. And this is specifically for one of my listeners who asked for this. So Terry, thank you for asking.
Marisa Shadrick :And I have the video for you so you can see the video and know exactly how to do it. Just a little hint, it’s much easier when you do it on your mobile device than on desktop. But until next time, take care and I’ll talk to you soon.
