I told ChatGPT to make my chores more fun — these 5 plugins made everyday activities even more rewarding and productive

I’ve found myself exploring ChatGPT’s massive lineup of plugins on a weekly basis.

The wide range of best-use cases that those plugins cover covers a lot of ground for most of the activities I regularly do. Getting exposed to new artists, songs, albums and playlists thanks to the Spotify and Apple Music plugins has been great. Tapping into the Etsy plugin to come up with clever gift-giving ideas and find the actual items that match what I’m searching for has been super beneficial. And making use of the AccuWeather plugin to plan my day of errands around a particular day’s forecast has come in handy.

While taking note of the many plugins that could assist me in a variety of ways, I thought about which ones could work hand in hand with ChatGPT’s recommendations for making my everyday chores just a little bit more enjoyable.

Prompting ChatGPT to give me a unique idea on how to make that happen while using one of its many plugins to give me an extra helping hand for each chore has been a pretty rewarding experience. Here are the five fun chore concepts the chatbot gave me, along with the five plugins that I used alongside them.

1. Cleaning and Todoist: To Do List & Calendar

Prompts: Create an hour-long cleaning speedrun from my current Todoist cleaning tasks. Break it into 10-minute missions and give me XP for each.

After presenting ChatGPT with the challenge of giving me the best methods it could come up with to make five everyday activities more fun, it made sure to turn each of them into something backed by “more momentum, novelty, competition, a reward, or a satisfying finish line.” On the apartment cleaning front, it took note of all Todoist tasks I designated as cleaning jobs that needed to be taken care of and turned them into objectives I needed to complete to gain real-life experience points (RPG nerds will get what I’m going for here).

For instance, clearing my kitchen counter granted me +10XP, emptying my dishwasher gave me +10 XP, vacuuming my living room gave me +20 XP, cleaning my bathroom awarded me +25 XP, putting away random things got me +15 XP and rearranging my bookshelf sent +15 XP my way. I didn’t know I’d ever participate in a speedrun attempt at tidying up my apartment as much as possible, but somehow, ChatGPT made it happen.

2. Laundry and Spotify

A cluttered bedroom with wood floors showing laundry baskets piled up with clothes and random toys and objects on the desk and floor — (Image credit: Getty Images)

Prompt: @Spotify Give me a bunch of playlists that are perfect for whenever I'm folding the laundry.

Like most of you reading this right now, I’m guessing you find the act of doing the laundry outside of your home to be tiresome (but always mandatory). It’s even harder for me to pick up that bag of clean clothes that have been sitting in the corner of my room for a whole week and finally sift through it. I tend to get some of my more mundane chores done a whole lot quicker when I have some music compelling me to stay in constant motion while I’m folding up all of my pairs of jeans.

Asking the Spotify plugin pushed it to make this emphatic statement: Laundry folding deserves its own soundtrack. The trick is to pick music that makes the job feel less like a chore and more like a mini dance party, nostalgia trip, or relaxing break. It came up with 15 playlists for me to cycle through during my repeated clothes-folding sessions, such as the 80s Cleaning Playlist, Clean Work Songs – R&B, Pop, Hip-Hop, Afrobeats, Etc! and the 90’s–00’s Cleaning Playlist.

ChatGPT came up with three ways to turn my assorted laundry folding duties into something a bit livelier with the following challenges:

The three-song challenge: Fold as much as you can before three songs end. No pausing to scroll.
The sing-along bonus: Every time a favorite song comes on, fold an entire category: shirts, pants, towels, or socks.
The final-boss round: Save the socks and fitted sheets for the final song. Finish before the music ends to win.

3. Meal prep and Pantry Persona

Prompt: Help me recreate restaurant-quality dinners at home. Give me five dishes using chicken, steak, or turkey, along with rice, pasta, potatoes, or steamed vegetables. Make each dish feel different from an ordinary weeknight dinner. Score each for flavor potential, difficulty, cost, and how well it reheats for leftovers.

On my never-ending quest for delicious delicacies that I can stretch out over the course of a week, I’ve gotten accustomed to using ChatGPT to generate recipes that stick close to my culinary preferences. It always does a commendable job in that department, especially since it suggests the best order for me to cook each dish, the best cooking techniques for its listed dishes and even meat thermometer options I should consider buying to make sure they’re all cooked to perfection.

Once I look up the right recipe for the dishes ChatGPT gives me, I save them to my Pantry Persona plugin, fit them into a proper meal plan, set up a shopping list for whatever dish I’m making next and get step-by-step guidance while I actually cook the dish. The work done by ChatGPT, my own research and the Pantry Persona plugin did a great job of making sure HelloFresh’s Provençal Chicken & Creamy Dijon Sauce with Mashed Potatoes & Garlicky Green Beans recipe came out of my kitchen a lot better than expected.

4. Decluttering and TickTick: To-Do List & Calendar

Prompt: Be my decluttering game master. Give me one 10-minute mission at a time, starting with the easiest area of my home. Each mission should help me identify 10 items to keep, relocate, donate, sell, or discard. Award points for completing decisions and clearing useful space. Don't make me get rid of anything I'm unsure about; give me a separate review box for those items.

@TickTack:To-Do List & Calendar: Set a flexible recurring task for my decluttering duties every Saturday.

Just like my time spent cleaning up my apartment, I also spend plenty of time decluttering since the thought of me getting my own episode on Hoarders scares me to death. I’ve also used ChatGPT to take my decluttering duties and give them the “RPG XP” real-life game treatment, which led to it coming up with something called “Declutter Quest.” The first mission I was given, which was called “The Easy-Win Sweep,” had a main objective tied to making decisions about 10 items sorted across keep, relocate, donate, sell or discard.

And with each category came the reward of XP, such as selling something and getting +15 XP in the process. Getting a +10 XP bonus for completing all 10 decisions within 10 minutes was also a nice touch for this game-like experience. The TickTick plugin worked in conjunction with my decluttering task by turning it into a flexible recurring 10-minute habit I had to complete every Saturday.

Setting a timer, tackling one small area in dire need of decluttering, checking off the mission once it’s finished and keeping track of the XP I’ve accrued works so much for someone so ingrained in gaming experiences as me.

5. Exercise and AllTrails

Prompts: Find beginner-friendly hiking trails in New York where I can also do some assorted exercises.

@AllTrails Find beginner-friendly hiking trails in New York where I can also do some assorted exercises.

ChatGPT has given me a long list of exercises I can do whenever I’m outdoors walking along a hiking trail, such as walking lunges, calf raises, bodyweight squats, etc. Also, the AllTrails plugin has made me aware of a bunch of hiking trails that appeal to someone like me who engages in those types of simple exercises supplemented by lengthy walks. That hiking recommendation tool placed me in a few local spots that let me simultaneously perform power walking and exercises that get the blood pumping. As a local New Yorker, ChatGPT sent me to beginner-friendly hiking trails such as the Prospect Park Loop, Battery Park City Greenway and Central Park Trail.

The takeaway

ChatGPT’s collection of plugins is extremely handy for mostly everything I do on a daily basis. Todoist, Spotify, Pantry Persona, TickTick and AllTrails have all lent their help in maximizing the fun factor tied to ChatGPT’s unique approaches to completing my everyday chores. I’m sure I’ll find more ways to integrate ChatGPT’s plugins into my daily routines for a wider range of tasks at some point (I’m sure the Tredict plugin will get added to my plugin playlist if I ever take on any endurance training challenges…).