Summary
ChatGPT may not be my most-used AI tool, but I still rely on it a lot for tasks that it excels at. For instance, features like voice chat and quicker responses often make ChatGPT the first app that I reach out to rather than, say, Gemini or Claude. Recently, though, I’ve been using one of ChatGPT’s newer features to do more than chat with an AI — monitor things on the web that I don’t want to do manually. After two weeks of using this feature in the Schedule section of ChatGPT, I feel as though I have a proactive assistant who handles things on my behalf and briefs me! The one tab in ChatGPT I never used until recently Turns out laziness has a name: Schedule ChatGPT has quietly been adding several entries to the sidebar, and I wasn’t paying attention. Things changed, however, when I started exploring the Schedule tab in ChatGPT, which I had previously used only for scheduled messages. This feature seemed like the perfect way to schedule a reminder or a task for a later date. While tinkering around, though, I came across a feature called monitoring tasks, which has been a game-changer, to say the least. This feature, which works as an agent that monitors webpages and other parts of the internet for you, has made ChatGPT more capable than just providing an email brief. Over the last two weeks, I’ve set up several monitoring tasks with ChatGPT, and they have saved me hours I’d have spent doing them manually. This may also be a good time to mention that ChatGPT’s monitoring feature is quite advanced and customizable. Fortunately, using the Monitoring Tasks function to boost productivity and save time is easy! Setting up my first price-tracking task My browser tabs finally get to retire The first thing I figured I could do with ChatGPT’s monitoring feature was set up a price tracker for shopping websites. Now, the experience is different from, say, using a price tracker like Keepa to monitor an individual product. Here, I could set up ChatGPT to visit a product page at a specified frequency, check the product’s current price, and notify you if it meets a specific condition. For instance, I was on the lookout for a Cajon from a specific brand and wanted to know when it hit a specific price. The prompt was simple. I asked ChatGPT to “Let me know when this product goes under [Price limit],” followed by the product URL. For some reason, ChatGPT doesn’t seem to have much luck with Amazon products; it relies on third-party sources for data. However, with other shopping sites, ChatGPT first checks the current price and sets up the scheduler in a minute. Once set up, this feature makes it easy to avoid missing good deals. By default, ChatGPT may schedule checks on the page once a day. However, you can change that frequency to meet your requirements, for example, to once an hour. Yet this system isn’t particularly well-suited to flash sales, but it works for times when you need to plan ahead. Following blogs that I used to forget to check RSS reader, you’re relieved of duty This new ChatGPT feature has also replaced RSS readers in many instances. For context, though, I wasn’t heavily reliant on RSS readers because many of the blogs I want to follow don’t offer that option. Also, keeping another service for this purpose seemed a little out there. Thanks to a monitoring system I can set up, I get prompt updates whenever there’s an update on a blog that I want to follow but forget to check. Compared to an RSS reader, ChatGPT offers more customization options. Let’s say I want to keep track of major announcements from Anthropic about its AI models. Instead of asking ChatGPT to notify me for every entry, I can specify the request by asking it to notify only if something is specified in that blog post. For instance, I can customize the monitoring function to receive a notification only when the blog post mentions a substantial increase in reasoning performance. The additional customization options also come in handy in this aspect. Catching job postings without refreshing The bot that stalks listings for me You can also use this ChatGPT feature to search for suitable job postings. Once again, you can customize the prompt to ensure you receive the desired updates at the appropriate frequency. For instance, I can ask ChatGPT to keep searching for postdoctoral fellowships in a particular academic discipline and notify me whenever it comes across a topic of interest to me. Normally, you’d end up spending hours, if not days, doing this manually. As you can guess, this option is more useful when tracking job listings on individual websites rather than, say, LinkedIn or Glassdoor. That is, instead of checking whether there are new listings on the Careers page, you can ask ChatGPT to do that for you. You can also specify the types of job postings you want to be notified about, instead of getting spammed every time the website makes a change to that page. Where Schedule has let me down so far I’m sure you understand the potential of scheduled and monitored tasks on ChatGPT. Let’s not pretend that these things are perfect. As I said, there are limitations, and one of them is that ChatGPT doesn’t have access to all websites on the internet. This means the tool will often rely on third-party websites or search results to provide information, and it cannot always do so. Similarly, depending on your plan, ChatGPT may limit the number of monitoring tasks you can set up. Regardless, considering how customizable tasks are, you might want to check out what can be done there.