7 Productivity Hacks for the AI Era
Forget time-blocking and Pomodoro timers. The AI era demands a completely new productivity playbook. Here are seven strategies that actually work when you have intelligent systems at your disposal.
Productivity Has Been Redefined
Every productivity article from the last decade told you to batch your emails, time-block your calendar, and protect your deep work hours. That advice was not wrong -- it was just designed for a world where you did everything yourself. In 2025 and beyond, the most productive people are not the ones who manage their time best. They are the ones who delegate to AI most effectively. Here are seven strategies I use every day as someone who builds AI systems for a living.
The Seven Strategies
1. Treat AI as your first draft machine. Whether it is an email, a proposal, a code review, or a data analysis, never start from a blank page. Give your AI assistant the context and let it produce the first 80%. Your job is the last 20% -- the judgment, nuance, and personal touch that makes it yours.
2. Automate your information diet. Stop scrolling news feeds and Slack channels. Set up AI-powered digests that summarize what you need to know from all your sources into a single daily briefing. I built a custom agent that scans our project management tools, email, and industry news every morning and gives me a prioritized summary in under 30 seconds.
3. Use voice-to-action pipelines. The fastest input method is speech. Dictate tasks, notes, and decisions throughout the day, and let AI parse them into actions -- calendar events, Jira tickets, follow-up emails, and CRM updates. The gap between thinking and doing should be milliseconds, not minutes.
4. Build decision templates, not to-do lists. Most of your daily decisions are variations on patterns you have seen before. Document your decision-making criteria for recurring situations and let AI apply them automatically. Approve vendor invoices under a threshold? Route support tickets by category? These should never require your attention.
5. Practice aggressive context-loading. When you sit down to work on something, dump every relevant document, conversation, and data point into your AI workspace before you start thinking. The better the context you provide, the more useful the AI's contributions -- and the faster you reach a good outcome.
6. Schedule AI audit hours. Once a week, review what your AI tools are doing. Check the quality of automated outputs, refine prompts, and identify new processes to automate. This meta-work compounds dramatically over time.
7. Protect your creative time fiercely. AI handles the analytical and administrative load, which means your unique value is creativity, empathy, and strategic thinking. Block time for these activities and defend it. The paradox of AI productivity is that the more you automate, the more important your distinctly human contributions become.