There's a lot going on around AI at the moment, especially as it improves and the AI Tools become more powerful.
As a busy professional or small business owner, time is your most precious resource and AI tools can change how you work, saving you hours every week so you can use that time to focus on what really matters.
The Benefits of AI for
Productivity
Automate Routine Tasks
AI tools are great for those repetitive tasks that take up time, energy and focus. You probably already use email management systems to filter and organise your Inbox. You can use AI prompts as you write to same
time and typing or rewrite paragraphs or whole documents. e.g. Gmail - Smart Compose
Scheduling assistants like Acuity:Scheduling or Calendly make it easier to find
meeting times, send out reminders, follow-ups and reschedule without you getting involved.
Enhanced Decision Making
Making
decisions takes mental energy. Using an AI tool like ChatGPT or Claude can support your thinking process. If you're stuck, ask it a question to get the thought process going, provide and outline or even format your thoughts in a more coherent way. It can also give you a fresh perspective that you hadn't considered.
Content Creation and Communication
Creating quality content for marketing, communication, or documentation takes significant time and may not be your strong point. Use an AI writing assistant to help draft emails, social media posts, blog articles and reports based
on your input. Canva's Magic features can create or modify designs from simple text prompts.
Personalise it to how you write, using your tone and preferred language. They learn what you like and
don't like, then use the draft to cut down the time you spend starting from scratch or staring at a blank screen.
Use them to write summaries of meetings and documents, transcribe meetings and webinars - Zoom AI
Companion, Otter.ai, Microsoft CoPilot All my webinars are now transcribed and summarised on my Course and Membership Hubs (see below) so you can quickly and easily find the information you need.
Getting Started with AI Tools
You'll find many of the existing applications you use have AI built in or being added, so you may already be familiar with them. If not, investigate those first.
Identify a repetitive task that takes up a significant amount of your time and check out the AI. For example:
- AI email assistant to cut down on writing and organising emails
- AI writing tool to speed up your content creation - I use ChatGPT for this all the
time!
- AI scheduling assistant to automatically schedule meetings - Acuity has been invaluable for this.
Find available tools that fit into your existing workflow.
While these are powerful tools, they're there to assist, not replace YOU! Use them to replace the low-value tasks so you can spend more of your time doing the things that AI can't (yet) replicate - strategic thinking, relationship building, more creative problem solving.
I've mentioned a few of the one's I use on an almost daily basis now. What tools have you been able to build into your systems and processes to save you time and effort?
Coming Up
