Productivity Hacks: How to Work Smarter with AI Tools

AI is here to stay. Despite all the concerns, it is not going to eliminate jobs, at least not the ones that actually require human intelligence and creativity. However, what AI can and should eliminate is the repetitive tasks that consume your working hours. You might be a freelancer, who is trying to organize their workday with maximum efficiency. Or you could be a business owner intending to maximize the effectiveness of their team. Either way, you could benefit from a few productivity hacks that are powered by AI!

Productivity Hacks 101: What Is so Good About AI?

AI exists in many forms, but the general idea behind that concept is the simulation of human abilities in relation to thinking and creating. At its most powerful, AI can simulate decision-making. However, that requires highly advanced systems and human oversight. Still, AI might be able to do the following.

• Automation. One thing AI is absolutely stellar at is performing repetitive tasks without feeling tired and unfulfilled like humans do in similar circumstances. AI can do a lot of the same actions — with minor variations as necessary — at the same time or very quickly. Indeed, no human can hope to be as productive in this regard as a well-programmed AI.
• Predictions and data analysis. AI can be built to make predictions using very complicated models. Those are based on data, and AI is very good at studying data and finding patterns in it.
• Natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML). AI that is created with NLP can “understand” human speech — or, at least, analyze it and react appropriately. AI that uses ML constantly learns and improves based on what information it is fed. 
• Generative AI. This type of AI “creates” content; it is trained on massive amounts of data, which it uses for pattern recognition. AI is not truly creative; it cannot substitute human creativity. However, it can emulate human creativity while also being a great tool for enhancing it.
• Research and summaries. AI is very good at summarizing data. It can also research much more efficiently than humans due to being able to process massive amounts of data almost instantly.

Overall, AI has a lot of wonderful abilities, and as you can see, they can become productivity hacks for freelancers and businesses alike. 

Focus on being productive instead of busy.

Tim Ferriss, author

AI Tools as Productivity Hacks

We want to discuss some of the AI tools that can count as productivity hacks. Keep in mind that there are many AI tools these days — we could not hope to mention all of them. However, we can name the ones that will help people of different professions. Let’s begin!

Consensus 

Consensus is a research tool. It boasts the ability to search millions of peer-reviewed articles. It offers filters, including the year of publishing of the studied articles. You can even interact with the summary Consensus produces to check its sources and read them yourself. And this tool has a free plan! Although that plan is very limited and focuses on providing abstract-only summaries. For unlimited searches through all of the texts of up to 20 papers, you need to pay from 10 USD a month (if you choose the annual plan).

GitHub Copilot

GitHub Copilot is very useful for developers, including freelancers. For a single user, GitHub Copilot is free with some limitations. A company can purchase a more feature-rich access. This tool provides recommendations on code and debugging. It can even use your prompt to create code! You can also “talk” to this AI to brainstorm your code. Overall, this platform is one of the best productivity hacks for developers.

Canva’s Magic Studio

Canva has an AI-enhanced feature called Magic Studio. It creates and edits photos, including background generation for them, offers AI voice services, as well as text-to-image and text-to-video features. There is a limited free plan, which does not provide all of the above services. There are also separate payment plans for small and big teams. Canva’s AI can facilitate designer work.

Quillbot

Quillbot’s application is relatively limited; it only works with texts. However, it can do a lot for your texts, including paraphrasing, summarizing (which is useful for research), detecting AI and plagiarism, humanizing text that is written by AI, and checking grammar. Given how important texts are for modern businesses and freelancers — for communication, marketing, and many other purposes — using Quillbot is quite a productivity hack. 

Grammarly AI

Grammarly is a good resource for freelancers and businesses. It can help you polish your writing, and it even offers a free, though limited, plan. According to Grammarly’s website, the product has been using AI for 15 years, which is, indeed, impressive. But now you can also use generative AI to help you with drafting and improving key documents, for example, emails for your customers. 

General Content Creation or Improvement

Jasper, Claude, or ChatGPT work with content. That includes creating new content, as well as improving your own. ChatGPT is also often used for brainstorming. The type of content varies — for example, ChatGPT can produce numerous types, from text to code. Jasper, which is predominantly a marketing instrument, does not have a free plan, but Claude and ChatGPT do. Jasper does have a free trial that makes it easier to decide which of the three to choose.

Otter.ai

Otter.ai is very useful for recording meetings. It offers more services, for example, meeting summaries. It works with Zoom, MS Teams, and Google Meet. You can get 300 minutes of transcription a month for free! However, if you are going to use Otter.ai a lot, you will need to pay from 8.33 USD per user per month. 

Are There Pitfalls with These Productivity Hacks?

There are certain issues to consider when discussing productivity hacks that involve AI.

• Costs. Most tools on this list have quite reasonable prices, but they are still an investment. Some are pricier than others. The costs may be prohibitive, especially if you are a small business or just a freelancer. Fortunately, a lot of the tools have free tiers. In addition, keep in mind that saving time means saving money (along with the well-being of your employees or yourself as a freelancer). The AI tools can be truly life-saving and worth the price. 
• You need to know how to use AI tools. It requires some practice on your side. Still, eventually, you will learn how to make good prompts and how to work with your AI.
• AI requires a lot of training and, eventually, oversight. Even with that requirement, AI saves time and improves efficiency. But be ready to help your AI help you. Without monitoring and check-ups, AI can cause issues by making errors. 
• You also need to set up most of the AI tools, especially if you want them to take into account your preferences. It means that you need to spend additional time on them. 
• Certain types of AI have been rather controversial, arguably for a good reason. It is especially true for generative AI, which has been criticized for, among other things, being trained on materials it should not have had access to. In addition, AI seems to cause a lot of environmental issues. It is a good idea to study these topics in detail before choosing an AI tool to use.
• Some clients do not want AI. Naturally, you should respect their preferences, even if it means reduced efficiency. 

Productivity Hacks: In Conclusion

AI offers a lot of options both for freelancers and businesses. Speedier research, better code and content production, and automatically transcribed meetings are just the beginning! However, keep in mind that AI productivity hacks require some work and resources before they can truly reach their potential.