- Seven ways to use AI for getting more done, none of which are about typing faster.
- The real productivity unlock isn't speed. It's subtraction: fewer meetings, fewer subscriptions, fewer decisions you make twice.
- Most surprising: auditing your own calendar for meetings that never produce a decision, then killing them.
- Also non-obvious: letting AI sort your notification pile into "ignore" instead of summarizing it for you to read anyway.
- The build item turns any task you've repeated three times this month into something that runs itself, no developer required.
Ways to use AI for getting more done usually means the same seven tips: draft this faster, summarize that meeting, let a bot answer your emails. All of it makes the pile move quicker. None of it makes the pile smaller.
Here's the part most productivity content misses: the hours you lose every week rarely come from typing too slowly. They come from tasks that shouldn't exist in the first place, a meeting nobody remembers scheduling, a subscription nobody remembers signing up for, a small decision you make from scratch every single day when a rule would do the job once. AI is good at speed. It's better, and far less discussed, at spotting the stuff you can cut entirely.
So this list skips the speed tricks. Every idea below removes a task instead of accelerating it, and every one ends with something you can start this afternoon.
1. Find the Meetings That Never Produce a Decision
Denise runs operations for a nine-person agency, and she sits in eleven recurring meetings a week. One Tuesday she got curious and pulled the notes from her last six weeks of standups into a chat, then asked a simple question: which of these ever ended with someone deciding to do something differently? Four of the eleven never had. She canceled two on the spot and turned two more into a shared doc that updates itself.
This isn't about summarizing meetings faster. It's about using the record of what already happened to answer a question you'd never sit down and tally by hand: is this recurring block of time still earning its slot on the calendar?
Start today: Pick one recurring meeting you dread. Pull the notes or transcripts from the last month, whether from a tool like Fireflies or your own scribbled notes, and ask an AI model to list every concrete decision or action item that came out of each session. If the list is thin, you have your answer.
2. Cancel the Subscriptions You Forgot You're Paying For
This one isn't a budgeting tip. It's a memory problem, and AI is good at memory. West Monroe's research found that people underestimate their monthly subscription spending by more than double: the average guess is around $86, the real number closer to $219. The gap exists because recurring charges are built to be invisible. Nothing ever asks you to notice them again.
Start today: Export your last 90 days of card transactions as a CSV from your bank's app, drop it into a chat, and ask the model to flag every recurring charge and guess what each one is for. Cross off what you still use. Cancel the rest, or point a tool like Rocket Money at the ones you want handled automatically going forward.
3. Write Yourself a Standing Rule Instead of Re-Deciding the Same Thing Daily
Marcus freelances and files his own expense receipts. For two years he decided, one receipt at a time, which folder each one belonged in. It took maybe ten seconds per receipt, which felt too small to fix, until he counted: over four hundred tiny decisions a year, all for a question with the same five answers every time.
He described the last twenty decisions out loud to an AI model and asked it to turn the pattern into an explicit rule: this vendor, this category, every time. He built that rule into a simple filter, and the decision stopped needing him.
Start today: Notice a small decision you make more than once a week: which folder, which reply, which category. Describe your last ten calls to an AI model and ask it to write the underlying rule as a plain sentence. Turn that sentence into a Gmail filter, or automate it properly with an email workflow built around the rule.
4. Turn the Task You've Done Three Times This Month Into Something That Runs Itself
Every other item on this list is about cutting a task down to nothing. This one is about the tasks you can't cut, the ones that keep coming back because the business genuinely needs them done. The move here isn't doing it faster yourself. It's noticing the repetition and handing the whole thing off.
If you've caught yourself doing the same multi-step task three separate times this month, whether that's compiling a report, checking a set of accounts, or moving data from one tool to another, that's the signal. Write down the steps once, in plain language, the way you'd explain it to a new hire. That description is most of the work. BYOBot turns that description into an agent that runs the task without you opening the tab again.
Start today: Write down, in order, the exact steps of the task you've repeated most this month. Not the summary, the actual clicks and decisions. That's the spec. Hand it off from there.
Describe the task you've repeated three times this month and let BYOBot turn it into a workflow you never have to run by hand again.
5. Find the Step in Your Process That Doesn't Need to Exist
Every team has a process step that survives purely on inertia: an approval that used to matter when a different person held the role, a form field nobody reads, a status update that gets sent and never opened. These steps don't show up on anyone's list of problems because each one only costs a few minutes. Added up across a team, they cost a lot more.
Describe your most annoying weekly process to an AI model, step by step, exactly as it happens. Then ask the question nobody on the team has time to ask out loud: which of these steps could disappear entirely without anyone noticing? You'll get a shorter list back than you expect, and at least one honest surprise.
Start today: Pick your least favorite recurring process. List every step in a doc or say them out loud into a voice-to-text app. Ask the model to flag which steps exist only because "that's how we've always done it," then test removing the least defensible one for two weeks.
6. Let AI Tell You What to Ignore This Week
Most advice about drowning in notifications tells you to summarize them faster. That still leaves you reading everything, just in shorter form. The better move is asking a model to sort the pile into three honest buckets: needs a real reply, informational only, and safe to skip without reading at all.
The permission to ignore something is worth more than the summary of it. You don't need to know what was in the newsletter you were never going to open.
Start today: Dump your unread Slack messages, emails, or app notifications from the last week into a chat. Ask the model to sort them into those three buckets. Bulk-archive the "safe to skip" pile without reading a word of it.
7. Batch the Errands You Keep Making One Trip at a Time
This one doesn't strictly need AI at the moment you run the errand, and it's worth saying so. What AI is good at here is the part before that: seeing a pattern across a messy list that you'd never sit down and sort by hand. A running to-do list of errands, calls, and forms usually has three or four natural clusters hiding in it, grouped by location or by which ones can be handled over the phone instead of in person.
Start today: Paste your running errand list into a chat and ask it to group items by location and by which ones can be done by phone or online right now. Tackle one cluster this week instead of making four separate trips across the month.
Pick One
Don't try all seven this week. Pick the one that made you wince a little, the one where you already suspect the answer. That's usually the one worth doing first.
Sunday, All Things Agentic reports what changed in AI that week. Wednesday, The Loop builds one workflow end to end. This column hands you the ideas in between, and the full directory of agent workflows is there whenever one of these ideas turns into something worth automating for good.
Turn "I keep doing this by hand" into an agent
Whichever item you picked, if it's a task that keeps repeating rather than one you can cancel outright, BYOBot turns your plain-language description into a workflow that runs without you.
Frequently Asked Questions
- No. The free plan of any major chat AI handles every idea in this list. The paid step only shows up if you decide to hand a task off permanently, which is what BYOBot's workflow directory is built for.
- Yes. Every action here is copy, paste, and ask a question in plain English. None of it requires code, an API key, or a developer. The automate repetitive tasks page walks through the no-code version of the build item step by step.
- Usually, and that's a feature, not a bug. Cutting a meeting forces a real conversation about whether it still earns its slot. Send a short note explaining why, offer an async alternative, and most people are relieved someone finally asked.
- Working faster still leaves you with the same pile of tasks, just completed sooner. Every idea in this edition removes a task from the pile entirely: a meeting that stops happening, a subscription that stops charging, a decision you never have to make twice.
