From Overwhelming to Organized — Reading Long Slack Threads with ChatGPT 🤖
After returning from a long vacation, I found myself facing the overwhelming task of catching up on dozens of lengthy, +50 replies Slack threads, which I had to follow to know what was going on in the team and the company. I knew that going through all of the messages would be time-consuming and overwhelming. Am I going to do it by myself one by one in 2023? Hell to the no!
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That’s when I decided to turn to ChatGPT, a powerful AI tool that can summarize entire conversations while retaining important information. I decided to prepare a GPT prompt instead, copy/paste all the conversations there and read the summarised unified version.
Here’s the prompt that I made:
ChatGPT, I’m going to send you a raw copy of a Slack thread, they are going to be pasted in the following format:
”””
[Username]
[Date]
[Message]
[Emoji Reaction 1]
[count of reaction 1]
[Emoji Reaction 2]
[count of reaction 2]
…
[Username]
[Date]
[Message]
[Emoji Reaction 1]
[count of reaction 1]
[Emoji Reaction 2]
[count of reaction 2]
…
”””
I need you to provide me with a text, with the following format:
”””
Subject: [Subject of the conversation]
Summary: [A brief summary of the main points discussed in the conversation]
Highlights: [Highlight key takeaways from the conversation in the summary section]
Opinions:
- [Name of Person 1]: One-liner summarizing their opinion or contribution to the conversation
- [Name of Person 2]: One-liner summarizing their opinion or contribution to the conversation
- ...
“””
Ensure that the one-liners accurately capture each person's idea or contribution to the conversation.
Here is the pasted Slack conversation:
"""
<PASTE YOUR SLACK THREAD HERE>
"""Here is one of the very important results I could get from a discussion among company members about carpet bugs (names are changed):
Subject: Black Carpet Beetles Infestation
Summary: Christa discovered a couple of Black Carpet Beetle larvae in their apartment and this has caused concern about a potential infestation. They plan to clean, freeze and go through all the closets as a precautionary measure. They believe that the beetles may have come from another apartment since they have not been on vacation.
Highlights:
- The larvae grow to 7mm in length and can cause significant damage to natural fibres.
- The group discusses potential solutions to get rid of the infestation, ranging from burning the entire apartment complex to getting an exterminator.
- They express mixed feelings about the severity of the problem and whether or not it can be resolved.
Opinions:
- Viima: "Just burn the entire apartment complex."
- Antti: "Best I can do for now is a lighter. This sucks."
- Mikko: "Just let them eat some carpets or useless t-shirts. Kidding though :stuck_out_tongue:"
- Kaija: "Some exterminator will come and throw all your stuff away and kill all of those bastards. Hopefully, insurances are good."
- Christa and the others in the group did not provide any additional opinions or contributions to the conversation.I decided to avoid extras and just share the prompt. If you’ve had any similar experiences using ChatGPT or GPT API, I’d love to hear about them, and any prompts that you found useful. Additionally, if you have any suggestions for optimizing this prompt, please don’t hesitate to share them. Let’s keep the conversation going! 🙌
