Watch Me AI: Budgeting prompts + Meeting prep hack + Nano Banana fun
A ChatGPT prompt for financial planning, a 5-minute meeting prep process, thoughts on rampant entrepreneurship, and playful experiments with Nano Banana.
By Mollie Amkraut Mueller · · 3 min read
Prompt of the Week
One of my favorite ways to use ChatGPT is for financial planning. It can turn your budget and dream goals into a roadmap.
Try this:
Given the details below, help me understand how much money my partner and I need to earn (and save) to achieve our dream life in [10] years.
- Regular household expenses (I took a screenshot of our budget spreadsheet and pasted it into ChatGPT).
- Dream life: a list of "dream life" expenses, like a vacation house, with rough cost estimates. We do this activity once a year as a couple.
- Current income for both of us and estimates of growth.
- Other life details like # of kids/dependents, location, etc.
Please make reasonable assumptions for tax rates, savings growth, inflation, etc.
Disclaimer: This will be directionally accurate and needs refining to turn into a plausible roadmap. Don't make any big life decisions based on the first round of results!
Work Hack I Recommend
Spend 5 minutes prepping with ChatGPT before every meeting. You will have more productive meetings and greater impact.
My simple prep process:
- Start with this prompt: "Help me prep for my upcoming meeting with [name]. Here's the context: [copy/paste emails or screenshot how this meeting got set up]. My goals for this meeting are: [totally fine to say you don't know yet]"
Stop there if you're short on time. You'll get solid advice from just that.
- Go deeper (when it matters): "Research [name] and help me predict what they'll be interested in. Strategize how to use these 30 minutes to build towards my goal of ___."
This is where it gets interesting. ChatGPT will often surface things about their background, recent projects, or company priorities that I missed, and help me better shape the conversation towards shared goals.
- Fill knowledge gaps: If they work in an industry I don't know well, I'll say: "Explain [their company/role/industry] to me like I'm smart but new to this space."
I included a quick example in this demo video.
Deep-ish Thoughts
One of my big predictions for the future of work is the rise of rampant entrepreneurship. AI has already removed the technical barrier, anyone can now spin up a site, product, or agent without knowing how to code. Now we're watching the growth barrier fall too. Lovable, my favorite vibe-coding platform, just made its customers' business growth its north star metric. That's a rare move, and it signals a shift toward tools that don't just let you create, but actually help you build traction.
Read the post here: The Growth Barrier Falls: How Lovable's Metric Shift Unlocks the Next Phase of Rampant Entrepreneurship
Just for Fun
I've been trying out Google's new image editor tool called Nano Banana. Here are a few recent explorations for your enjoyment.
My goldendoodle is a notorious food thief. Impossible to capture on camera, I used Nano Banana to re-create her recent heists.
It's planting season here in the PNW and I needed inspiration for a boring patch of dirt. Nano Banana delivered an excellent mockup.
Longer video with more non-work-related use cases for Nano Banana, plus instructions, here: YouTube