AI Tools To Save Time And Increase Productivity, On Tuesday last, I was studying my calendar and got that tightness in my chest. I had three client discovery calls stuck and unread emails and a strategy document by the end of the day. This is what the contemporary knowledge work has made us to feel: we are deluged with administrative rubbish which forbids us to do what is, actually, the deep work that we are actually getting paid to do.
I have worked at a laboratory during the past 2 years working on my workflow. Being an AI user, I have tested, signed in, and even canceled dozens of AI productivity applications. I have gone through glittering demos which were supposed to revolutionize my life and in the middle of the onboarding process, I realized that it was not more than mere glittering hype.
However, when giving all this marketing jargon, it is only some artificial intelligence applications that move the needle. It is not that you have to take the place of the robots, but to lessen the workload of mindless tasks and find time to get home to eat. It is a realistic perspective of the AI ecosystem, productivity, and the stack that it ought to be developed on, and traps based on experience..
The “Intern” Mindset
The issue as to how to utilize these tools will somehow need to be addressed prior to proceeding to the particular software. I have experimented that AI is most effective as an intern full of enthusiasm and at other moments hallucinatory.
Put an intern to write on the marketing trends, and you will get a generic and useless report. A good first draft will be produced with just a tone guide, a structure, and five distinct pieces of data (give them). The same applies here. That tool will not turn you into a more productive person, but you can get it to react to the situation.
1. Conquering the Inbox and Writing Drafts.
Key Players: ChatGPT (Plus), Claude, Jasper.
Writing on blank papers is the greatest time waster in the business world. It could be an email of the stakeholder who is getting it hard, or a blog post, there is worry when the cursor is blinking. I am not writing my final draft with ChatGPT (GPT-4 specifically); I simply get rid of the writer’s block. As one example, when I have to notify someone about project delay, which can be quite stressful, I will paste my crass, angry text in the chat and request it to paraphrase to exhibit sympathy, professionalism and solutions. It consumes my 30 seconds time as compared to the 20 minutes of suffering before choice of words when it should have taken 20 minutes.
My new favorite tool in the analysis of long documents is Claude (by Anthropic). I have handed out 40 pages of regulation of the industry. I did not feel like spending the entire morning reading it, so I suggested to Claude that we “best off-sheet the three largest risk to my business refersenced herein. It did it in seconds. Real life constraint: These tools may be misleading. They are even able to sound shrewd, in cases where they are not right. I will never fact-check a copy-paste. I see what I receive as a v2 draft, rather than the final product.
2. Escaping Meeting Purgatory
Those against AI: The Association to Advance Artificial Intelligence.
You are overworking yourself when you get hand notes during a Zoom meeting.
I have been working with Otter.ai about a year, and it transformed my attitude towards meetings radically. It also listens to my chats, records the audio, and transcribes it immediately. Yet it is the productivity trick of retrieving the action items.
A few months ago I dealt with a project that included six stakeholders. My only other action would normally be to spend an hour after our weekly sync to see what was promised by who. This is whereby I turn the AI to make the summary. I go through it, edit a few parts to make it more straightforward, and decline it. Case Study: Fireflies.ai is the case of one of my colleagues.
She makes it part of her CRM (HubSpot). Here, the AI will document when she does a sales call and it will be imported into the client file. She approximates this to save her about 5 hours weekly alone in data entry.
3. Images Without the Design Degree.
The competitors in the marketplace: Midjourney, Canva Magic Studio.
I am not a designer. My stick people are suspicious. Yet, content demands visuals.
Competitor of the highest weight is Midjourney which is serviced by Discord and has high learning curve. You can create the photorealistic assets in your slide decks with the understanding of the stimulating syntax that appear like they were thousands of dollars.
To the user in question, however, the Magic Studio is more valuable in Canva. I have been forced to recently resize an image of a campaign to fit into four social media platforms. This was a hand set Photoshop work. Instagram stories and linkedIn Canva possess AI that, once a user clicks on the Magic Switch, will revert the content and provide it on Instagram stories and LinkedIn, as well as a Facebook banner. That was not a perfect one, I had to poke a few text boxes, still, it was 90 percent perfect.
4. The Glue: Automation of Workflows.
Key Players: Zapier, Make
It is at this point that you cease to be a user of AI tools and begin to construct an AI machine.
Zapier has introduced AI integration, enabling apps to communicate more intelligently. The following is a piece of workflow I follow to handle the inbound leads:
- One of the potential customers fills out a Typeform on my webpage.
- Zapier sends that text to the OpenAI to process sentiment and compose a individualized reply just like it is relevant to their industry.
- I save it in Gmail purses (I never saved it automatically, that is too dangerous).
- I will get a Slack message that tells me that there is a draft that should be reviewed.
I simply open the draft, make a few changes and send. This also minimizes the friction that is generated by context-switching, the eventual productivity killer.
The “EEAT” Reality Check: Privacy and Ethics
A warning has to be made by someone who is so much a part of this space. In the event that you do use these tools, you are frequently feeding a machine learning model data. Do not subject proprietary data, password, and sensitive client financial data to open AI models. This was a lesson learned the hard way as one of my peers post a confidential contract to a chat robot to make sure that there are no mistakes in the contract.
Although the possibility of that particular data being leaked is minimal, it is a breach of the majority of typical NDAs. In case you are in an enterprise, seek out versions (Enterprise) of these tools that ensure that your data is ring-fenced and not being used to train.
More so, the Uncanny Valley problem exists. We are beginning to realize AI writing-it is overly fond of such words as “delve,” “tapestry and landscape” etc. Overusing these tools will sterilize your communication and build no trust in your audience. Then use AI to organize and to gain speed; to bring in your own stories and to voice to make it personal.
Building Your Stack: Start Small
Making an attempt to implement all these tools to-morrow, you will actually see your productivity tanking. You will spend the whole day dealing with subscriptions and interface learning.
My advice? Pick one pain point.
- Drowning in email? Initial work ChatGPT in drafting.
- Buried in meetings? Get an AI notetaker.
- Messy scheduling? Google Check out Motion is another product that is based on AI to arrange your calendar tasks automatically.
AI tools are not intended to perform more tasks; they are supposed to perform the proper job. Outsourcing repetitive mindless tasks like offloading to software or robotics makes mental space for strategy. Now there is the real value of you.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Q: Am I going to risk exposing my data to any potential danger with the assistance of these AI tools?
A: It can if you aren’t careful. Free and standard versions of such tools as ChatGPT can use your data to train their models. With sensitive business data, either the version you should use is always the Enterprise or Team the versions, which have the guarantee of data privacy or do not train the data in the settings.
Q: Are these tools expensive?
A: The majority of them are based on the freemium model. It is free to start and serious productivity normally involves a subscription. A good stack (e.g., ChatGPT Plus and an Otter.ai subscription) costs between $20 -50 a month.
Q: AIs can be a real replacement of a human assistance?
A: Not entirely. AI is tremendous in data crunching, drafting and scheduling but there is no judgment, subtlety, and the capability to address complex inter-personal crises. It is more appropriate to consider it a force multiplier to a human, and not the complete replacement.
A:I do not know how to prevent AI-written text to appear robotic.
A: Context is key. Requesting, state the audience and make the AI apply a particular tone (e.g., a conversational, witty, or direct one). Another tip is that the output should be always edited manually to eliminate repetitive adjectives and add own experiences.
Q: What is the tool that is workable among beginners?
The most versatile generally is ChatGPT (or Claude). It deals with writing, brainstorming and summarising in a chat interface with very minimal effort and that is why it is the simplest tool to experience the instant effect of AI on your workflow.