Achieving exponential productivity isn’t about working 50× more hours – it’s about leveraging smarter tools. I learned that to dramatically scale my output (aiming for 50x), I had to integrate AI-powered tools into my daily life. Why? Because AI can take over the busywork and give me leverage. Instead of doing tasks the old, linear way, I now have digital assistants handling them in parallel. The early results have been game-changing: faster decisions, more creativity, and far less friction in my day.
Why Exponential Productivity Requires AI
The only way to break out of the 24-hour day limitation is by delegating – and AI is like an army of always-on assistants. Integrating AI into everyday tasks means I can scale myself almost like a startup scales its operations. Consider this: the average knowledge worker already spends 28% of the workweek on email and another ~11 hours per week in meetings . That’s dozens of hours lost to low-value tasks. I am sure you have felt that pain: endless inbox upkeep, back-to-back meetings, laborious research… leaving little time for high-level thinking and action.
I realized that if I wanted exponential productivity (not just a 10% improvement, but 10× or 50×), I needed help from technology. AI tools can automate the routine and speed up the rest. They act as force-multipliers for your effort – handling in seconds what might take you hours – thereby saving time, reducing friction, and increasing output every single day. In short, AI let me buy back my time and reinvest it into more important work.
My current AI Toolkit, Categorized by Function
📧 Email – From Hours to Minutes
Email used to take up too much of my day—between responding, scheduling, and filtering out unnecessary clutter, it was a constant drain on focus. Now, AI handles 90% of it.
🚀 I use three tools to optimize email:
1️⃣ Fyxer → Fyxer learns my writing style, drafts replies, and helps with scheduling. It handles inbox management like a personal assistant, reducing the time I spend crafting emails. It even joins meetings and takes notes when needed.
2️⃣ ForageMail → ForageMail scans my inbox daily and delivers a single digest of non-urgent emails, newsletters, and general updates. This cuts my inbox-scanning time from 30–60 minutes to 5 minutes.
3️⃣ Shortwave → I use Shortwave for its fast interface and AI-powered inbox organization. It helps me process emails quicker than Superhuman, keeping me at inbox zero with minimal effort.
⏳ The impact: These tools bring email down to a 15–20 minute daily exercise, freeing up hours every week.
📝 Meetings – Smarter, Not Longer
Meetings are necessary, but they shouldn’t be a time sink. I’ve optimized my approach by using AI to transcribe, summarize, and extract action items from every conversation.
🔹 Granola → Unlike other AI meeting assistants, Granola doesn’t need to join the call. Instead, it records and transcribes locally, avoiding awkward bot participants. I can also add my own notes in real time, and Granola enhances them automatically.
🔹 Roam → As a remote-first company, Roam is our cloud HQ. It allows me to see who’s available, step into a virtual office for quick calls, and drastically reduce meeting time. Instead of 30-minute Slack threads, I can resolve issues in 3-minute voice chats.
🕒 The impact: Meetings are no longer a time drain—they are instant, transcribed, and actionable. Roam alone has cut our meeting times at Metaversal drastically and the Roam team like to boast that average meetings in ROAM are a mere 8 minutes.
🎨 Presentations – Done in Minutes, Not Hours
Before AI, preparing a clear, polished presentation could take half a day. Now? It’s done in minutes.
🔹 PlusAI → I feed my ideas and notes into ChatGPT, refine the structure, then import them into PlusAI to instantly generate a well-designed, structured presentation.
To prove the point, I turned this blog post into a 9-slide PlusAI presentation that you can see (I left it completely unchanged so you get a sense of what the first output with just a simple prompt can produce).
⏳ The impact: A process that used to take hours or even days now takes 5 minutes.
🔍 Deep Research & Industry Insights – AI as an Intelligence Engine
Making the right decisions requires clear, timely, and comprehensive information. Traditionally, market research, competitor analysis, and industry intelligence took days or weeks—but with AI, that entire workflow has changed.
🔹 ChatGPT Deep Research → ChatGPT Deep Research is quite simply one of the best products I have ever used in my life. It simply blows my mind. I use it to conduct market research, competitor analysis, and strategic reviews for new product development. Instead of manually combing through industry reports, I can generate summaries of trends, SWOT analyses, and opportunity maps in minutes.
🔹 Grok3 → Social commentary is crucial for product-market fit. I use Grok3 to analyze trending social discussions on X, uncover pain points, and validate ideas. This is incredibly useful when developing new product strategies—I can see real-world complaints and frustrations before building a solution.
Together, these tools give me a 360° industry perspective in minutes. Something that would have taken a research analyst days or weeks to compile is now available on demand.
But with this level of automation comes a hidden risk—falling into the trap of thinking research = real work. AI can become the new dopamine fix, much like scrolling social media once was. The ease of generating new reports and analysis can lead to information overload, creating too much output and flooding teams with constant research.
The key is balance: AI should be an enabler and enhancer, not a crutch. Producing a research report every day doesn’t mean better decisions are being made. The real value isn’t in the volume of documents AI can generate—it’s in how we use those insights to take action.
⏳ The impact: Huge time savings, but even more important, better decision-making with richer insights at my fingertips.
🧠 From Productivity to Creativity & Decision-Making
It’s not just about saving time—it’s about increasing creative output and making better decisions.
📌 Faster Decisions: I spend less time searching for information and more time acting on it.
📌 More Creativity: By reducing friction in writing, research, and presentations, I have more brain space to think, experiment, and strategize.
📌 Less Cognitive Overload: AI eliminates mental clutter. Instead of switching between dozens of tasks, I get the information I need in one place, at the right time.
⏳ How Much Time Have I Gained?
If I were to guess it’s anywhere from 4 to 12 hours a week but AI isn’t just making me more efficient—it’s making me more effective.
🔮 What’s Next?
I see AI automation as the future of high-performance work. If you’re not leveraging AI, you’re leaving massive efficiency gains on the table.
🔹 What AI tools have made the biggest impact on your workflow?
Drop a comment—I’d love to swap recommendations.
Awesome article and thanks for the cheat sheet!
My favorite AI right now is NotebookLM, I'm using it to download books/content into a very short summary podcast ..all in seconds