Ah, peak productivity. The holy grail for so many of us. We read the books, we buy the fancy planners, we follow the thought-leaders… only to fall back into our habits and find ourselves no closer to our goals. Maybe you wish you had an assistant who could help keep you on track throughout the day. Or a coach who could help break down your goals into concrete tasks you can work on everyday to stay on track.

Well, you guessed it - AI tools can help with all of the above. We’re in the early days of truly personalized AI assistants, but there is already a ton of leverage to get out of currently available tools. Let’s dive into two tactical ways AI can help you live your most productive life right noq:

Break down big goals into actionable tasks

Oftentimes I find the hardest part of working towards a goal is figuring out where to start. Using an AI system such as ChatGPT as a productivity coach or thought partner, we can get help visualizing a step-by-step plan to actually work on a goal every day or week. Here’s a prompt you can use to set the stage, and then simply follow up by sharing the goal you want to work towards:

This should get you a decent outline, and then collaborate with the app to drill down further and further until you get to the level of specificity that works for you! If you want a more hands-on product to work with than ChatGPT, current to-do list apps such as Todoist and Taskade have AI features that will also help you easily break a large task down into sub-tasks and add them all to your to-do list.

Prioritize and schedule your to-do list for an optimal day

Companies are just scratching the surface of AI in personal productivity. Right now, you can give your LLM of choice a list of tasks on your plate, and it can make its best guess at how to prioritize them and how long each will take. The biggest shortcoming is that to do this really well, the AI needs a ton of information about you to make high quality, personalized suggestions. Short of that, you’ll need to add a ton of information into your prompt and even then, the results will be highly dependent on the context of your day and what else comes up.

Over time, I’m excited for my to-do list to start learning about me. I’d like it to sync with my calendar and track when I tend to work on what kind of tasks, and how long it typically takes me to do similar tasks. I’d like it to understand emails and messages as they come in, and dynamically reprioritize my day for me. As it becomes knowledgeable about my personal habits, it can help me both schedule my day to best suit my preferences, as well as make smart recommendations for how I can improve. There are some companies already working on this, such as Trevor AI, Simplerlist and Motion, and I’m excited to see how they improve in the next couple of years.

That said, to achieve the best results possible with today’s tools, here is the information I would give to ChatGPT along with my to-do list and ask it to create a schedule for my day - fill in the blanks with your own answers:

Now copy and paste in your to-do list, and see how the generated schedule compares to what you would have planned yourself!

In my dream world, my to-do list will automatically know all of these things and create my schedule for me accordingly, but in the meantime we can get a pretty helpful output by sharing this information and using AI to help us prioritize and schedule tasks.