Revolutionizing Productivity: How AI Can Supercharge Your Time Management
Lately, I found myself constantly "firefighting" at work. Even though I'd start each day with a clear set of priorities and tasks, invariably, the pings would start rolling in from various applications. Why didn't the code and testing get finished by the due date? Where did the adjusted efforts go for this specific development? Which client asked for a particular implementation?
Answering these "urgent" questions required coordinating with multiple people and cross-referencing documents across different tools. Most frustrating, it yanked me out of whatever I had set as my goal for the day. I found myself being pulled into impromptu meetings and having to set aside quiet time in the evenings to do focused work. There needed to be more time in the workday to do my job.
It's no surprise that I began to feel the effects of burnout.
The modern workplace has become significantly more distracting and interruptive in recent years. If you sit in front of a computer daily, you likely endure an endless barrage of pings and dings from teams, your email, and constant calendar invitations. The research found that collaborative demands on time—such as brainstorming meetings, draft reviews, and momentary gut checks—have increased more than 50 percent in the past two decades as barriers to collaboration have decreased.
Artificial intelligence could be the much-needed relief from these overwhelming challenges. It has the potential to simplify the collaborative burden we put on others and help us complete our to-do lists. The key is understanding how to harness its power.
I've spent more than two years helping people be more productive at work—first, helping them understand Salesforce and now building a team with developers and helping them get things done. Through these experiences, I've found one overarching theme that permeates the thousands of conversations I've had with people about their work and time: Most of us want to manage our time better and be more productive at work, but that doesn't mean we have all the answers, let alone a sound system for ensuring productivity and efficiency.
As AI becomes impossible to ignore at work, tried-and-true organizational systems beg for a refresh. I have tried four of the most popular—the GTD method, the Eisenhower matrix, time blocking, and the Pomodoro method—and consider how artificial intelligence could super-charge them both for their adherents and the millions of people who can never entirely stick to one system to get them through the day.?
How to get things done
First published in 2001, David Allen's book?Getting Things Done?quickly gained popularity for its promise to eliminate stress and increase productivity. His method has a straightforward idea: Get everything out of your head and put it somewhere else where you can organize it. While working at Trello, I encountered many Getting Things Done, or GTD, acolytes who swore by this structured method. So how do you get started? There are five stages:
Like any good framework, GTD brings order to the chaos of work bouncing around in our brains. The beauty of GTD is its adaptability. As explained in the book and?subsequent resources, numerous ways exist to implement it. It's also tool-agnostic, allowing you to choose the system that best suits your preferences: pen and paper or your favourite project management software.
AI power-up: Use AI to capture information
AI-powered note-taking tools like?Supernormal,?Fathom, and?Otter?can eliminate step one by extracting summaries and action items from meeting recordings. Previously, you might have had a project manager or executive assistant sit in on a meeting and take notes. But now, these tools automate that job by having a bot attend conferences and send notes afterward.
Other tools automatically capture data elsewhere.?Hoop?captures activity across Slack, your meetings, and soon email, while?Limitless?uses a wearable pin-like device throughout all your daily in-person activities.?Arc, a web browser launched in 2022, has also hinted that AI capture is part of its near-term product roadmap. These tools could allow workers to forgo the mental and physical energy needed to remember tasks and write them down, which can add up if you're in many meetings daily.
AI has the potential to revolutionize the GTD framework. It could automate all five steps: auto-tagging and grouping tasks, analyzing your workload and suggesting how to prioritize tasks, and—finally—doing the tasks for you. The future of productivity is bright, and AI is leading the way.
Working the Eisenhower way
1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower said, "I have two kinds of problems: the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent." As president and during his storied military tenure, Eisenhower was known for being ruthless with his time management.
The Eisenhower matrix, codified by Stephen Covey's book?The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, teaches us to distinguish between the important and the urgent. Unfortunately, we often get off track because we prioritize urgent yet unimportant tasks rather than essential but less urgent tasks.
We can borrow from Eisenhower's work ethic by considering our work as a matrix with urgency and importance on the two axes. Therefore, work can be:
Once we start sorting tasks according to this framework, we can reconsider what we spend time and energy on and course-correct.
The Eisenhower matrix helps us prioritize longer-term projects that require focus but don't release the short-term dopamine hits that often come from checking urgent but unimportant tasks off our to-do list.
AI power-up: Use ChatGPT to categorize your to-do list
ChatGPT is well acquainted with the matrix and can help us identify how to categorize our lists with some simple context sharing. When you write your prompt, could you be explicit about what's most important to you to accomplish? A prompt might look like this:
"You are a project manager helping me organize my tasks using the Eisenhower matrix. My most important goals this week are related to marketing my startup. Other tasks that are more operational are less urgent, for example, anything related to public relations activities. Categorize this task list [paste task list]."
(Bonus tip: If you're a visual thinker, ChatGPT can also visually categorize your to-do lists for you, plotting them on the Eisenhower matrix.)
As AI tools become more robust and feature-rich, you can imagine them suggesting which tasks you should prioritize on an ongoing basis by knowing exactly what's relevant to you at any given moment and applying the matrix accordingly. Eventually, AI will do some of the work for us.
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Blocking out time
If I've learned anything from seeing how thousands of people manage their work, everyone does things their way. I spoke to people every day who were figuring out how to manage their work best, and at my workplace, I'm doing user research to figure out how AI with OpenAI and ChatGPT can help people be more effective with task management and getting their things done. I've yet to have two identical conversations about how people manage their work. It's the beautiful messiness of humanity—we're all individuals with different organizational preferences, workplace skills, and processing styles.
Still, there's a temptation to categorize people to understand better how people handle their work. Let's group people into three categories: list people, visual people, and calendar people.
People were happiest with a giant, never-ending list of items to accomplish. Some prefer Apple's Notes app, others Google Docs, but the most important thing was that a consolidated list of tasks existed for them to tackle—wherever it was. The visual people, meanwhile, needed to?see?their functions in some schematic representation to understand what to do. And then there were the calendar people, who scheduled tasks as events in their calendar and lived by the adage,?if it's not in my calendar, it's not getting done.
I am a mix of a visual and a list person. I need to see tasks represented visually, but something about crossing items off a list is highly satisfying.
Time blocking is a productivity framework for that final class of thinkers—the calendar people. The key is to make sure your calendar reflects your priorities. People will block periods on their calendars either to reflect the task they'll be working on during that time or to do different types of focused work, like writing or coding. In a meeting-heavy work culture, you might block out time to focus on a project or have a scheduled moment of open-ended, unstructured thinking.
Time blocking is effective because it forces people to focus on a finite resource: time. Calendars are the most honest representation of what work needs to get done, how, and, of course, when. Tasks and projects should be limited to the hours set aside in the day to work. If a task spills over, it takes time away from another task.
Of course, the challenge is that work is dynamic, and calendars can feel inflexible. People may constantly need to update their calendars if work spills over, they miss a deadline, or a personal matter pops up that sidetracks them from their specially allotted time.
Time blocking is nothing new. It's been around for centuries. Benjamin Franklin, one of the most productive and prolific humans of all time, famously time-blocked his day into six appointments:
In his autobiography, Franklin complains about people constantly interrupting his day and taking him off track…something we can all relate to.
AI power-up: AI can manage your calendar into task-size blocks depending on your priorities
For modern-day workers managing tasks, AI can help with how dynamic the workday can be. Many AI-powered tools, including?Reclaim?and?Sunsama, have popped up to help time blockers manage their schedules more efficiently and effectively using AI. Reclaim will shuffle team meeting times to account for individual preferences for focus time, and Sunsama lets people match their priorities to their calendars.
Time blocking can be a great exercise in helping you understand whether your time matches your priorities. And if they don't, you can course-correct.
The Kitchen Timer That Changed Productivity
What does a tomato-shaped timer have to do with productivity? If you're a devotee of the Pomodoro technique, the answer is everything.
The Pomodoro method was developed in the 1980s by a graduate student in Italy who needed help staying focused. He was inspired to use a simple kitchen timer to help him create periods of intense focus—about 20 or 25 minutes, often on one task at a time, followed by a five-minute break. Interestingly, this technique mirrors how our brains work: We're not great at focusing for long periods, but we can concentrate intensely for short bursts.
Followers of this technique break their day up into Pomodoro-sized chunks. For example, I might budget two hours for writing the first draft of this piece, but to help me feel comfortable with such an enormous task, I plan to give myself six Pomodoros with breaks in between. Planning for 20 minutes of intense focus is much less daunting than two hours.
In this way, the Pomorodo method plays into the psychology of breaking up a big, seemingly insurmountable task into smaller, bite-sized chunks with the reward of a break at the end. Some people will incentivize themselves by indulging in small luxuries at the end of a Pomodoro session, such as coffee, a snack, or even a walk. Others may allow themselves a short social media break, check their email, or catch up on the news at the end of a Pomodoro to satisfy a specific urge.
Some apps, browser extensions, and plugins make it easy to incorporate the Pomodoro method into your workflow, such as the?Pomodoro Power-Up?for Trello.
AI power-up: Integrate Pomodoro with ChatGPT
If AI helps eliminate our workflow's rote and repetitive tasks, AI paired with the Pomodoro technique can increase our creative velocity. Here are a few ideas on how:
Regaining control over time
Oliver Burkeman's book "Four Thousand Weeks" examines the impact of modern technology on time and productivity, highlighting unfulfilled promises of increased leisure time resulting from the adoption of time-saving appliances. The emergence of generative AI promises increased productivity and efficiency. Still, it may raise the bar for creative output, necessitating greater demands on individuals' time and energy. Harnessing AI to enrich our lives rather than succumbing to unforeseen consequences is essential. While AI cannot alleviate existential concerns, its judicious application has the potential to simplify our professional lives, enabling us to focus on meaningful pursuits and allocate more time to activities aligned with our aspirations.
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