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AI productivity tools use artificial intelligence to automate tasks, streamline workflows, and boost efficiency, saving you time and enhancing overall productivity. They can help you get more tasks done faster with less effort, even if you’re new to AI or not tech savvy. Whether you want help writing emails, organizing tasks, or summarizing your meetings, there’s an AI tool to free up your time for more meaningful and creative work — or for just lounging around by the pool, if that’s the way you roll. No judgment here.
Understanding how to use AI productivity tools starts with identifying what they can do for you. Generative AI apps can help you brainstorm fresh ideas or help you draft emails quickly, for example, while natural language processing (NLP) tools can analyze text and extract key information from documents. But you don’t need to get hung up on the technical details.
Here is my breakdown of five AI productivity tools you can use to make your life easier.
ChatGPT
OpenAI’s largest and most popular AI product transformed conversational AI by being able to understand and produce human-like text. This AI productivity tool is great for brainstorming, drafting emails, and outlining reports. With its chatbot-style interface, this AI productivity tool feels as natural as chatting with a friend — which it can totally do if you activate the voice mode.
Grammarly
This leading AI writing tool is popular for its real-time grammar, spell-checking, tone adjustment, and generative AI features. You feed it prompts, or instructions, and it can create anything from outlines to effective emails based on your guidance. Whether you need an AI tool to help you edit your academic paper, a letter to the editor, a thank you note to a neighbor, a resume, or Harry Potter fan fiction, it can improve the clarity of your work as you write.
Notion AI
If you love keeping your notes and projects organized, Notion AI is a game-changer. This AI productivity tool uses an intuitive, colorful, and customizable platform to help you keep track of your daily tasks and progress toward your goals. Think of it as an all-in-one digital planner that helps you manage your goals, whether you’re planning a team project or tracking a simple habit. It’s also a great way to collect everything from document summaries to favorite articles to song lyrics to digital copies of your grocery receipts, and more.
Fireflies.ai
Fireflies.ai is an AI-powered meeting assistant that lets you easily transcribe, summarize, record, and analyze virtual meetings. It captures video and audio recordings and generates notes so you can read, listen to, or share them. If you want to analyze a very long meeting, this AI productivity tool can help you automatically take notes, generate summaries, and even suggest action items. You can also integrate with conferencing platforms, calendars, and communication tools, which allows you to easily record and summarize your online meetings. This is great for work, but you can also use it for your virtual book club meetings, school reunion planning, or your fantasy baseball league.
Calendly
Scheduling meetings for different clients or teams doesn’t need to be a hassle. Calendly automates the process by syncing with your calendar and letting others pick times that work for everyone without back-and-forth emails. If you don’t have a fixed schedule for meetings or booking appointments, you can use this AI productivity tool to refine your weekly scheduling by offering additional meeting slots or reserving certain slots, like setting up available meeting hours for different days.
Quick tips to get started with AI productivity tools
Not sure where to begin? Here are three tips to make sure you get off on the right foot.
Start with one AI tool
Pick one AI tool that you think might be both helpful and fun — that will make it less intimidating. After you get comfortable, you can gradually start exploring additional tools to address other tasks that are part of your daily routine. For example, after becoming more confident in using ChatGPT for drafting emails, you can use Grammarly to polish your writing or Calendly to automate scheduling. This approach prevents burnout and allows you to see the benefits of each AI tool before moving on to more advanced features or platforms.
Build your AI skills gradually
You don’t need to be an expert from day one — think of building your AI skills like learning to cook. Start with toast before tackling soufflés. Begin by using AI tools for simple, familiar tasks, like drafting an email or organizing your to-do list. As you get more comfortable, try using AI to brainstorm ideas, summarize long documents, or even suggest creative headlines. The more you experiment, the more natural it becomes. Just like muscle memory, you’ll start instinctively knowing which tool to reach for when a task pops up. Before you know it, using AI will feel as routine as checking your inbox.
Track your progress
After trying different AI tools, you can start monitoring which tasks become faster and easier. Keeping an eye on how AI productivity tools make your life easier and save more time will help you make smarter choices on which tools to keep or adjust. Start by tracking the time you spend on specific tasks before and after using AI. For instance, note how long it takes to transcribe meetings and analyze documents, then compare that with your time after using an AI tool.
Embrace AI as your everyday advantage
Many professionals — myself included — have found that using AI tools for everyday tasks at home, school, and work can free up time. How you choose to spend that time is up to you. By using just a few AI productivity tools, you could reclaim at least two hours every workday for more meaningful tasks, creative thinking, or simply enjoying a longer lunch break. As a beginner, you don’t have to master these tools right away, but start small, experiment, and find the best tools that will help make your everyday tasks more manageable and efficient.
Do you want to learn how to craft effective prompts for different AI tools without the financial commitment? See our list of the top free, beginner-friendly prompt engineering courses.