This is part 2 of Quickstart Guide: How to boost your personal productivity with A.I. tools

No matter how rewarding and productive it feels to be in the flow, sometimes you have to get interrupted – in the name of the Greater Good Flow. From ones driven by external commitments (like morning alarm and appointment reminders) to the guidelines of high performance (like power blocks start/stop and bedtime alarm), reminders set rhythm to our days and create balance in our lives.

Knowing that you’ll be notified if something more important comes up gives one peace of mind needed to get into the flow in the first place. Here is how A.I. can remind you about something important just at the right time and the right place. And when pieces of the getting-lotta-sh*t-done puzzle just fall into their places, it feels like the Universe is playing on your side!

… a task fell thru the cracks in my inbox

Love it or hate it, but email is likely an important part of your life – and a pile of inbound and outbound requests. Even if you are good at managing these requests, it would be very comforting to have a safety net (or is it umbrella?) for the runaway requests. And this is exactly what Yva does. It scans through your emails trying to understand if it’s about an incomplete task (and whether the deadline is approaching), and creates a daily list of tasks that require your attention. Cool, eh?

Bonus: It can even notify your co-workers if they haven’t completed the tasks you have assigned to them.

… some of my to-dos can be done for me

Guess what beats your overloaded email when it comes to the number of uncompleted tasks? Your to-do list. Dumping things into to-do list usually helps with getting them out of our minds (and thus releasing space for creative ideas to flow), but helps very little with actually getting them done. (Scheduling tasks into your calendar helps with that – we’ll talk about that later). Cloning ourselves – many times over – seems the only way to get’em all done. That, or delegating some of them to an assistant. But finding an assistant and explaining to her what needs to be done is another task on the same bloated to-do list. Catch-22 in flesh.

Enter Any.do Assistant. They employ what they call “push A.I.” approach “… to automatically review your tasks, and mark the ones it can do for you. With your approval, you’ll be connected to a combination of smart robots and diligent humans who can help you accomplish that task.“

Bonus: As you build your delegation muscle, you might find that face-to-face explanation is most effective with some “assistants” (think family). Any.do’s voice recognition combined with location-based reminders makes getting it done almost as easy as saying, for example, “[put things in place at home]”

… I’m nearby a store on my shopping list

Speaking of location-based reminders and family – wouldn’t it be awesome to know when your family or friends are at a grocery store? Just in case your forgot to put something on the shared shopping list?

That’s what Capitan does, among many other shopping-list-related tricks. Like, it also groups items by aisles of a store, so that you won’t have to visit the dairy section twice just because yogurt was added to the list at the last minute. Another smarty feature: it makes a suggestions for things to buy based on your shopping history – perfect to take full advantage for an impromptu store visit.

Bonus: It even opens shopping list for the store you approach.

Next up is how to get informed by A.I. about… →