3.3 - Use AI tools (seriously)
If you're not already using AI tools in your daily work, start now. This isn't a productivity tip in the same category as the others in this part. It's a fundamental shift in what one person can do in a day, and the people who use these tools well are operating at a meaningfully different scale than the people who don't.
There are two layers worth knowing about.
The chat interfaces. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and similar tools are the foundation. Use them daily. They can draft emails, brainstorm ideas, summarize long documents, translate, explain anything you don't understand, edit your writing, act as a thinking partner, and a hundred other things. If you're treating them as occasional novelties rather than as a daily tool, you're leaving most of the value on the table. People who get serious about these tools end up using them dozens of times a day within a few weeks.
The agentic tools. This is the more recent and bigger shift. Tools like Claude Code, Claude Cowork, OpenAI Codex, and Perplexity Computer can do work for you, not just respond to questions. They can connect to your computer, your browser, your files, and your apps. They can research on the internet by actually opening pages and navigating between them. They can compose slide decks, write code, organize your files, navigate complex websites, fill out forms, and complete multi-step tasks that previously required your direct attention for each step.
The practical implication is that many tasks that used to take you an hour can now take five minutes, because most of the doing is handled by an agent and you're just specifying what you want and reviewing the result.
Some specific uses worth trying immediately:
- Deep research. Ask an agent to research a topic thoroughly across the internet and produce a structured summary with sources. The output beats hours of manual searching.
- Slide decks. Tools can produce a draft presentation from a prompt or a document. The result usually needs editing but saves the worst part: getting to a complete first draft.
- Drafting and editing emails. Pass in the context and ask for a draft. Edit. Send. The drafts are usually 80% of the way there.
- Image, video, and audio generation. AI image (ChatGPT, Gemini), video (Kling, Seadance, Veo, Higgsfield, Runway), voice (ElevenLabs), and music (Suno) generation have moved past novelty into production-useful for anyone who needs visual or audio content.
- Writing code. Even for non-developers. AI can write small scripts, automate repetitive tasks, and explain technical things you didn't think were accessible to you.
- Summarizing. Long documents, meeting transcripts, books, papers. Drop them in, ask for a summary calibrated to what you actually need.
The leverage gap is widening. People who use these tools well are getting more done in less time, learning faster, producing better work, and reaching further than people who don't. The gap widens every few months as the tools get more capable. The right time to close it for yourself is now, not after you "get to it." Get the accounts, use them daily, and lean into the agentic features as they become available.