Where AI Can Help Your Productivity and Where It Won't

“By far, the greatest danger of AI is that people conclude too early that they understand it” —Eliezer Yudkowsky, AI researcher AI is everywhere today, and there are many exciting claims about what it can do to help us be more productive. But, is this just hype, or are there aspects of AI that can improve our productivity? That’s the question I am answering today. Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Hybrid Productivity Course Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 407 Hello, and welcome to episode 407 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. You may have noticed AI is everywhere. Our favourite apps seem to be adding more and more AI capability with each new update. And then there’s almost every video and article on productivity warning us that if we don’t get on board with this, we’ll be left behind on the scrap heap. It’s also an exciting time, and there’s no doubt that things are changing, and people are finding new ways to use AI to help us do our work. But beyond the hype, how are current AI models really helping with productivity, and what will this mean for us as we try to manage our time in the future? That’s what I am looking at this week, and to get us started, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Chris. Chris asks, Hi Carl, I haven’t heard you talk much about AI in your videos or articles. How do you see AI helping us with our time management and productivity in the future? Hi Chris, thank you for your question. The reason I have not written or spoken much about AI is that I am waiting to see where it settles down. Currently, it’s hard to work out what is true and what is pure hype. I saw a lot of noise about OpenClaw—an AI-type personal assistant that, if you give it access to your computer, can do a lot of things, such as make appointments for you, book flights, sort and reply to your emails and much more. That was certainly interesting, but once I discovered that I would need to hand over all my passwords and credit card numbers to OpenClaw, I lost interest. Call me old-fashioned, but I’m not comfortable giving up my passwords, credit card and banking details to a third party. Certainly not one that could be hacked very easily. Last year, I read Dominic Sandbrook’s series of books on British history from 1956 to 1982. That period covered some very interesting developments in technology, from the dawn of the nuclear power age to the introduction of the personal computer. In the late 1950s, it was predicted that we would all be driving around in nuclear-powered cars and that our homes would have their own nuclear power generators that would only need recharging every 10 to 20 years by the end of the century. Hmm how did that work out? To better answer your question, Chris, I stepped back and looked at how I am using AI today. My main use of AI is searching for specific information. In a way, AI has replaced how I search the internet. I use Google’s Gemini, and it is fantastic at collecting the information I want. No longer do I have to open multiple websites to try to find the information. This has significantly reduced the time I spend going down rabbit holes looking for something specific and being pulled down holes I never intended to go. I also use AI to generate subtitles and timestamps for my YouTube videos. Without AI, these jobs would take hours. AI can do it in minutes. I use Grammarly to spell-check my writing, and I believe it uses AI in the background to suggest how sentences are written. I rarely accept Grammarly’s sentence suggestions. It seems to destroy my voice and turn sentences into bland perfections that lack resonance or feeling. Beyond that, I am not knowingly using AI for anything else. I asked my wife how she is using it. My wife’s a full-time student, studying physical therapy, so she’s learning a lot about human anatomy and medical terms. She’s using AI to simplify complex concepts. She also occasionally uses Google’s Nano Banana to generate graphics for her presentations. So, if I look at how AI might help us with time management and productivity in the future, it does look like there will be some aspects of our work that AI can significantly speed up. In my case, generating subtitles and time stamps for videos is a great example. However, when it comes to managing our calendars and task lists, I’m not sure you would want AI getting involved. One thing I’ve always been ...