Thread by @Walter_Haydock

Drowning in newsletters?

Can't read them all, but want to stay up to date?

Use @OpenAI's ChatGPT and @zapier to automatically summarize them and build a rollup for you every day.

Here's how:

1. Trigger Zap upon receiving email

Select the “new email matching search” event.

Set up a search filter based on the addresses of all the newsletters you get. So it will look something like:

FROM: [e-mail] OR [e-mail]

2. Format date

Convert the complex date/time string from the email to something cleaner, like below. I strongly recommend converting to your own time zone to prevent confusion.

3. Extract the first URL

Add this to your summary so that you can quickly go to the full post if you want to read more. Zapier can only grab the first URL, so this won’t always work, but most newsletters make the first URL a link to the online article.

4. Find or create Google Doc containing entire email (optional)

You will use the date from step 2 to find or create a Google doc where you will paste the entire text of the newsletter. Add “_fulltext” or another suffix to specify which type of document it is.

5. Append the full text to the Google Doc

A key thing here, which is not at all intuitive, is that you must input the "ID" resulting from the search step for the "Document Name" field (not, as you might think, the name of the document).

6. Find or create Google Doc containing summary

Similar to step 4, except append “_summary” to the date grabbed from step 2.

7. Format text so that Google doesn’t block ChatGPT from accessing data

This step would not logically be necessary except for the fact that if anything from Gmail and OpenAI are “touching,” Zapier will give you a warning.

This is a silly and easily overcome competitive move by Google to box out ChatGPT. Just strip out the HTML tags from the body of the email, and Zapier will return text that can be processed.

8. Send data to ChatGPT

If you haven’t configured this already, you’ll need to give Zapier your OpenAI API key.

Here I tell ChatGPT what to do via the Assistant Instructions field and grab the output from step 7 to send as the User Message.

Here are my Assistant Instructions:

"You are a newsletter summarizer. From the message I provide, you will extract AT MOST three actionable, concise steps that I should take as a business owner operating at the juncture of cybersecurity and artificial intelligence.

Of special interest to me are things related to a) cybersecurity vulnerability management b) process automation c) generative artificial intelligence d) macroeconomic conditions e) negotiations and contracting.

Formatting instructions: Do not include the word "summary" at the start and add HTML line breaks (<br>) between each actionable step."

9. Add summary to Google Docs

Similar to step 5, append the results of step 8 to your document. I added in some additional formatting (see below) to make it easier to read.

10. Create filter to mark emails as read in Gmail (optional)

Using search string from step 1, create a filter to mark all inbound emails in Gmail as read so you don’t need to do this manually.

11. Read summary every day

Alright! If you’ve made it here, now you will have a nicely formatted set of newsletter summaries, along with a direct hyperlink to the full post.

This has saved me huge amounts of time; I hope it's helpful.

If you enjoyed this thread, please:

1. Subscribe to my newsletter at laserfocus [dot] substack [dot] com for more productivity hacks.

2. RT the first tweet.

#entrepreneurship #buildinpublic #productivity #nocode