There is more worth reading than any of us have time for. AI can help you extract the key ideas from books, reports and long documents quickly — so you can decide what deserves your full attention and absorb the most important content from everything else.
What you will need
A free ChatGPT account. For shorter documents and reports, you can paste text directly. For books, you'll be asking ChatGPT to summarise based on its training knowledge.
1
Get a book summary and key ideas
Ask ChatGPT to summarise any well-known book and extract its most important lessons.
📋 Example prompt — copy and paste this
Summarise the book [book title] by [author] in 500 words. Then give me the five most important ideas or lessons from the book, a quote or key passage that captures the author's main message, and your recommendation of who would benefit most from reading it.
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ChatGPT has read extensively and can summarise thousands of books accurately. For very recent books, its knowledge may be limited — use Perplexity for those.
2
Summarise a document you paste in
For reports, articles, policy documents or other text, paste the content directly into ChatGPT.
📋 Example prompt — copy and paste this
Here is a document I need to understand: [paste document text]. Please: summarise it in plain English in under 200 words, identify the three most important points, note anything I should pay particular attention to or that seems unusual, and list any action items or decisions it requires from me.
3
Extract action items from a long document
When a document requires you to do something, ask ChatGPT to identify exactly what.
📋 Example prompt — copy and paste this
Read the following document and extract all action items that require a response from me, including any deadlines mentioned: [paste document]. Present them as a numbered checklist ordered by urgency.
4
Compare two books or documents
Ask ChatGPT to compare the main ideas or recommendations from two different sources.
📋 Example prompt — copy and paste this
Compare the main ideas about [topic] in these two books/documents: [title 1] and [title 2]. Where do the authors agree? Where do they disagree? Which perspective do you think is better supported, and why? What would be a useful takeaway from reading both?