I’m a solopreneur, so I wear just about every hat there is in a business, and work all the hours I possibly can.  AI coming along has dramatically improved my personal productivity, and I believe it can make a huge difference to pretty much anyone, regardless of their role.

In fact, I believe the best place to start when it comes to generative AI is your personal productivity.   It’s the easiest way to start seeing ROI from buying tools, and it shows you how to start practically integrating it into your everyday life - something we’ll all be doing across the board soon enough.

Here are my 5 favourite AI tools to give my productivity a turbo boost:

Sybill

You may have seen AI note takers around in Zoom and Teams calls, but this one is the best.  It gives you super accurate transcriptions of your calls, as well as intelligent overviews of what happened, next steps, pain points and, very usefully, a one-click AI follow-up for emails.

Superhuman

Managing overflowing email inboxes is a common problem for many.  Superhuman’s deceptively simple tool provides a distraction free environment in which to manage your emails, alongside a range of keyboard shortcuts to unsubscribe, label, move, etc your emails so you can power through at 10x the speed.

Kondo 

This brand new tool is in beta only, but it’s coming very soon.  It’s exactly like Superhuman, but it’s designed for your LinkedIn inboxes.  LinkedIn messages are notoriously hard to organise, so this is a godsend.  In fact, it’s a bit better than Superhuman in that you can create your own labels: partnerships, leads, prospects, whatever you like.

Motion

Wave goodbye to ‘to-do’ lists and hello to AI-empowered time blocking.  Motion amalgamates all of your calendars into one first of all.  Then, you add your tasks and events, and it’ll automatically schedule them to make sure they get done on time, even if that means moving around other stuff.  But don’t worry - everything will be done to the deadline you’ve set.  It also features a ‘Calendly’ style meeting booking link - so it eliminates the need to pay for that separately.

Turboscribe

I love an audio message on WhatsApp.  It’s a great way to get a complex or sensitive message across, whilst not encroaching on someone else’s schedule or having to book a call.  The problem is, when you’ve got a lot of them, sometimes you want them in text version.  Turboscribe is a simple tool, less than £3 per month.  It sits on WhatsApp - you forward the audio message and it transcribes it into text for you.

The combination of these 5 tools saves me hours every day - hours I can spend selling, or strategising growth (also with plenty of help from AI!).  AI isn’t a silver bullet, it’s not going to do things for you without any human interaction, it’s there to help you get things done much more productively.