Harnessing AI For Enhanced Productivity & Better Work-Life Balance
Anything that has the ability to increase our productivity has the ability to improve our work-life balance. When a task that used to take you 30 minutes takes you 15, you’re less likely to see your work bleed into your personal time.
That’s just the start when it comes to AI, too—we can use computers to manage our schedules, our inboxes, and more.
A word on the term “AI” before we begin; We’re using it here to mean “any sufficiently complicated program”. Machine learning is not strictly necessary to qualify here; rather, we’re talking about modern “smart” technologies.
AI-Powered Email & Communication Management
According to a report by McKinsey in 2012, the average professional spends 28% of their day reading and answering emails. That’s more than a quarter of the day—and many professionals still find themselves answering emails after hours.
These numbers have probably changed since 2012, but in our estimates, they’ve probably gone up—with the rise of remote work, in-office communication is less common than ever. How can AI help?
Smart Email Sorting, Prioritization, & Composition
Email platforms have already integrated AI into your inbox; think of how Google automatically marks some emails as important, for example. There are also a variety of AI tools that can be integrated with your inbox to do some pretty cool things:
- Shortwave can extract data from email threads and help you search through your inbox.
- Gemini can summarize contents and automatically generate email replies.
- SaneBox can help sort and filter your emails.
Those are just a few examples; there are several AI tools that can help you automatically reply, extract data into spreadsheets, draft emails to sales prospects, and more. If these tools help reduce the time you spend looking at emails for even 15-30 minutes a day, you’ll find yourself with a lot more productive time on your hands each week.
Intelligent Scheduling & Time Management
With these AI tools, we’re hoping to help you prevent your work life from bleeding into your personal life too often. Intelligent scheduling and time management apps are an excellent solution to this problem; they can be synced with your calendar to help you preserve your habits, reschedule when necessary, and avoid conflicts.
Reclaim is a favourite of ours: it has a strong focus on habits, it can help you set buffers after difficult tasks to decompress, and it’s got a time tracker, calendar syncing, and even Slack integrations. Best of all, it’s completely free for up to two calendars, and paid plans are quite affordable.
There are several other time management apps available; Motion is great for project management, and Kronologic is perfect for following up with sales leads. Time management apps are one of the best ways to reclaim (funny that our favourite scheduling tool snagged that word) lost time.
Streamlining Social Media With AI
Social media is essential in the modern business world. Work in a particularly photogenic line of business? You’ll want to post on Instagram nearly every day. Work in a less visual line of work (like our own work in IT)? You still want to be making LinkedIn posts and the occasional Tweet.
Keeping up with content curation and generation can be overwhelming at the best of times; learning when to post, what types of content to post, and where to post them can be even more involved. Fortunately, there are AI tools to help with all of the above.
Content Curation, Generation, & Analytics
FeedHive is a great all-in-one solution for social media curation, generation, and analytics. It’s a great tool featuring some powerful AI features, including:
- Content recycling to help you turn old posts into new content
- Performance predictions that help you fine-tune content for better performance
- Conditional posting to automatically include CTAs or other posts when content reaches certain engagement thresholds
FeedHive’s hub also allows you to reply to comments across your social media feeds from one place—pretty handy!
For a free social media tool, we love IFTTT, which makes it extremely easy to cross-post. Technically, IFTTT is not AI (it uses if/then statements, which is about as low-tech as it gets), but we can’t help but shout it out any chance we get.
AI In Content Creation & Editing
Generative AI is all the rage right now, and for good reason; it can help you do anything from writing your own code to creating art. Right now, the biggest player in generative AI is, without a doubt, ChatGPT, the impact of which is likely yet to be fully understood.
Of all the things generative AI is good at, it’s best at writing content and helping people write content. We never recommend releasing purely AI-written content because it can actually make your site seem less trustworthy—but with a little editing and research, mostly AI-written content can perform exceptionally well.
Writing Assistance, Proofreading, & SEO Optimization
People tout all kinds of different AI writing assistants to help them generate content, from Jasper to Claude; we’ve tried a number of these products, but in our experience, it’s hard to beat good old ChatGPT in terms of cost. For most people, a free ChatGPT account and a bit of prompting knowledge are all you need.
ChatGPT can help you generate blog post ideas, write outlines for you, write headings for you, proofread your content, and more; all you have to do is ask. Like any AI tool, it has its flaws (it tends to write overly flowery headings, for example), but with practice and a bit of editing, it’s hard to beat.
When it comes to SEO, it’s all about tools—and there are some truly powerful AI tools out there. One of our favourites is Surfer; it uses natural language processing (NLP) to scrape articles, determine what terms are most important, and rank your content based on how it uses those terms.
We recommend using tools like Surfer in conjunction with AI writing tools like ChatGPT to integrate keywords into your content.
Integrating AI Tools Into Your Workflow
AI tools are a great way to improve employee productivity and reduce or eliminate repetitive tasks, but they need to be carefully integrated into your workflow in order to avoid disruptions.
As an IT company, we understand the importance of change management; employees need to be introduced to the software you’re using slowly, and shown how the tools can make mundane tasks less arduous. We recommend starting small, with team members from different departments who are excited about change, and helping them integrate the tools into their daily routines.
Start with one tool at a time; show your employees how it works, and generate excitement. To leverage AI tools effectively, improve employee well-being, and boost overall productivity, it pays to move one step at a time. Too much change and you might make things more inefficient. Learn how each tool works and how they can integrate with one another step by step, and you’ll reap the rewards.
Measuring AI's Impact On Productivity & Work-Life Balance
Leveraging AI to improve productivity and work-life balance can be a powerful move, but it pays to carefully measure the impacts of AI tools. That’s one of the reasons we recommend a slow rollout; it gives you the chance to calibrate, get employee feedback, and understand the practical and ethical considerations of implementing AI tools in your workplace.
Key Performance Indicators & Employee Satisfaction
There are several different KPIs you could use, depending on the role AI tools play in your workplace. Some of the indicators you can measure include:
- Time spent on emails before and after AI email assistants are rolled out
- Employee satisfaction (through satisfaction surveys) before and after AI
- Error rate comparisons before and after AI
- Social media metrics before and after AI
- Web traffic metrics before and after AI
Talk to employees before, during, and after each AI tool is rolled out. The goal of these tools should be to reduce or eliminate routine tasks, boost employee productivity, and improve job satisfaction. When your AI-powered tools are failing to do at least one of these things, or they’re boosting one metric while hampering another, it’s time to recalibrate.
Embracing AI For A More Efficient & Balanced Work Life
Artificial intelligence is here to stay, and the modern workplace will be heavily influenced by everything from generative AI to AI systems delivering predictive analytics. We’ve only touched on pure productivity tools here; AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants can free up time for executives and customer service agents but they can also completely transform a workplace.
We highly recommend slowly integrating AI into your workplace. Getting it right is a continuous learning process; new AI tools are being introduced at a rapid clip—but by understanding the reasons behind each tool and the best processes for integrating them, you can experience astounding growth in productivity, work-life balance, and employee satisfaction.
