🔫 Task Assassin: How to: 10x Productivity with AI (#52)

The happiest of Mondays Non-Techie, 

I hope you had the loveliest of weekends and are ready for a productive week ahead. I’m about to make it a lot more productive.

...Before we get stuck in this week, I’ve got a quick and cheeky ask.

I’ve been nominated for the Trailblazer award at the AI Revenue Summit. There’s 1 day left to vote and I’m coming in 2nd. It takes literally one second to vote - if you’ve got a sec, I’d be hugely grateful:

1. Click on this this link

2. Click on Vote under my silly red head (no sign-in or anything needed)

Thank you so much in advance 🙏

Anyway, there’s one part of AI that applies to EVERYBODY. It also just so happens to be the most effective use case AI currently has, and the one that gets you the most quick ROI.

This week, we'll be digging into AI tools for personal productivity. As always, they’re tools I’ve tried, tested and actively use myself.

I’m going to go through 3 challenges that everybody has if they work in the digital world:

1. Meetings
2. LinkedIn Messages
3. Calendars

Ready, let’s see how much time we can save you in the next few minutes.

🤝 Meetings: AI Note Takers

You’ve probably seen them dotted around in your Zooms and Teams calls. They’re usually in there as another attendee called “Rob’s Note Taker” or something.

If you haven’t, AI note takers are like a sort of AI secretary, sitting in online meetings and recording everything: a full transcript, a video and even an analysis of the key insights and next steps. (I used to do this actual job, minus the video, when I was a secretary myself). You’ve then got this super accurate store of exactly what happened in every single call.

There are loads of different options, but the 4 big players currently are:

• Fathom
• Fireflies
• Otter
• Sybill

They all do pretty much the same thing, with slight differences in how they analyse the call, or how accurate the transcripts are. I use Sybill, as it seems to be the most innovative of the bunch.

You tend to get:

• A verbatim transcript
• An overview of what happened in the call
• Next steps
• Key insights
• Body language analysis (Sybill only)
• Video recording

So far, so useful. It’s a great way to save time scribbling notes and spend time listening. That’s already hours - and probably reams of paper - saved.

But that’s not all - you can download that verbatim transcript, upload it into an LLM (ChatGPT, Claude, etc.) and use it in all sorts of ways:

1. Analyse a sales call for missed sales opportunities
2. Analyse a client call for sentiment and to assess the client relationship
3. Create really strong content ideas based off real client pains

… and so many other ways. The sky’s the limit.

🔥 LinkedIn Messages: Kondo

One of the best things about working in AI education is that I often get approached by being who have built their own tools and want me to test them.

I’ve been chatting with a lovely guy called Mitchell, who’s tackling the very real problem of managing your LinkedIn inbox. It’s riddled with problems:

• A complete lack of folders or tags
• It shows sent and received in the same place
• You can’t schedule responses for later

It’s slow and impractical, and it’s long needed changing. Enter Mitchell, and his cool new tool, Kondo. It’s not actually yet on the market - it’s in Beta mode, BUT I’ve cleared it with him to offer my lovely subscribers beta access, so jump in to test it for free before he starts charging!

Here’s what it looks like:

Down the side, you’ve got a series of labels that act as folders. You can set up whatever folders you like - I have:

• Inbound leads
• Potential partnerships
• Podcast invitations

That in itself saves tons of time. But you can also use an extensive series of Gmail/Superhuman style shortcuts throughout, too, e.g.

Those shortcuts help you fly through your inbox and get to that seemingly mythical Inbox Zero in no time.

On top of that, you get snippets. I’m always writing stuff like “If you’d like to book a meeting, click here and find a time that suits you: [calendar link].” You can pre-programme that stuff in so click one button, there it is.

To join the live beta, click on this link to get a free custom onboarding with the man himself.

📅 Calendar: Motion

AI is amazing at taking away the faffy, repetitive, irritating stuff from your working day. A really good use case is helping you manage your calendar(s). There is so much unnecessary clicking around, trying to find free slots,

Motion is an AI calendar I use every single day. Here’s what it looks like:

You can:

• Amalgamate all of your calendars into one - home, work, old calendars etc.
• Easily colour code and move things around
• Auto-scheduler regular daily tasks like lunch, the gym to fit in where they can naturally fit
• Set up different schedules to book events into, e.g. 9-5 for working hours, 5-9 for evening hours, weekend events, etc.
• Create personalised booking links to send out (just like Calendly but the experience is a bit nicer)

Not Only That, But: Goodbye, To Do Lists

Does your to do list actually work? Mine don’t - they just sort of, shift things around. And grow, to epically long documents that I start to worry opening. If you’re anything like me, you end up trying to chop it up with labels like important, urgent, mega urgent, etc and it all starts losing its meaning.

Motion takes care of that for you by automatically and intelligently time blocking out your tasks so they all get done on time, every time. 

When you get something in to do, instead of adding it to a to do list, you open a new task:

Then you fill in all the details on the right: when the task will start, how long it will take, the deadline, etc. And then comes the magic…it automatically schedules it for you around your events. No going through page after page, trying to move things around. I can’t tell you how much time that’s saved me.

This way, all you do is log in each morning and you see what you need to do. Bonus: If that time passes and you don’t manage to get the scheduled task done, it’ll notice you haven’t ticked it, and reschedule it again.

It’s magical.

Go on, give them a try. You’ll find a bit of a learning curve for each new tool, but it’s well worth investing the time to reap those precious minutes and hours every single day from then on.

Bit of exciting news - I’m planning to launch a second edition every week for this newsletter, which will cover AI news and new tools, every Friday. More on that soon.

Important: There won’t be an issue next week. I’m turning 40, having a huge party on the Saturday night and I’ll be spending Sunday hungover, eating takeaway and not touching my laptop.

Thank you and until the week after next,

Heather

PS Want to work with me?

• Here’s my AI training brochure (prices going up in just 2 weeks)
• Check out my AI learning hub: just £25/mo
• Or just drop me a reply to this email, I’m a friendly sort