Transcription
AI isn't just changing the way we work; it's giving us back our most valuable resource: time. The right AI tools can turn hours worth of work into minutes, and I have found my favorite ones that do just that. I'm going to share my favorite AI tools that have transformed my productivity, so that you can stop wasting time and get more done as well. Starting with number one: Descript.
As you might well know about me, I make videos. I do a lot of talking here on camera—not just here on YouTube in long-form pieces, but I also do interviews, I go on podcasts, I coach my clients, I do a lot of filming. So I have a lot of long videos, and the short-form game has always been something that I've just been kind of working on. I hadn't gotten all the way there with figuring out my pocket with short vertical videos until I met Descript. The basic idea is that I take all of my long videos and I upload them to Descript, where all of that content gets transcribed. That is a key feature; okay, it's not just about having all the words available to you, which is great from a content repurposing standpoint, but you also have the ability to edit those videos simply by deleting text. So if you are not good at video editing, huge bonus here.
The reason why this has been a game changer for me is because it's extremely advantageous for me to take bite-size pieces from videos like this and share them in short form—whether it's YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, TikTok, you name it. So I upload those videos to Descript, and their AI—my dear friend, Underlord—literally reads the transcript without my help and finds great sound bites for me, so that I can repurpose videos to those other places for a short-form friendly consumer experience. This is a game changer as a content creator, especially when you are bootstrapping and you're making video content. Maybe you have a video editor that specializes in one thing, but you don't have a video editor that helps you with this. Descript is something that can kind of help you get going as a thought leader who creates video content that needs shorter videos easily. Literally, I would just upload every video that I made to Descript, and whenever I needed a short-form piece of content, I would go to Descript and I would let Underlord find something very useful, export it, type up a little caption, and post it to Instagram. I didn't even have to think about it because I already thought about it; I spoke words on camera, and then the AI took that task off my hands of reanalyzing what I said to turn it into something new. This, to me, is the game changer for AI; it's breaking open your brain on the things that are already in there, but maybe you're not thinking about—the dots that you've already got inside your mind getting connected together. AI has connected so many dots that are already in my brain and gotten them out into the world. Descript is just one way that I do that. Love it for short-form video; game changer on the timesaver, if you're a content creator.
And if you are not a content creator, I highly recommend you just let a camera roll, talk, share some ideas—especially if you need a bit of a confidence boost in what you do—just upload that content to Descript and let Underlord tell you some underlying things that you're saying that are super interesting and useful that other people might want to hear.
Content created. While we're talking about AI tools that increase productivity, we also have to talk about what to do when you get that time back—and that's to focus on the greater vision. Having a vision for your business is one thing, but bringing that vision to life online is something else entirely, and that's where a lot of people get stuck. Trust me, I have so many messages, emails, DMs from people who want to take that step in building their online presence, but they get hung up in the text stuff and the details. Let's fix that right now because I found a great resource that's going to help you go after that vision without getting stuck in the weeds, and that's the sponsor of this segment of the video, which is our friends at Hostinger.
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AI tool number two: VoicePal. This is an AI ghostwriting app that was created by very popular productivity YouTuber Ali Abdal, and if you know him and you know his content, you know that this tool has to be a must-try—which is why I tried it. At first, I wasn't sure what the differentiator was, but I gave it a shot and just kind of started sharing ideas. I wanted to chat a little bit about an epiphany I had and started talking to VoicePal on my phone, basically saying, "I like this; this could potentially be a video idea; this could be a blog post idea; this could be something…" What's really cool about it is, let's say you go ahead and start sharing an idea—I'll do it now. I have this idea about creating a video around how your personal brand isn't just something that you do externally for people to find as a form of brand and marketing; it's also something that you do to build yourself. The more you put yourself out there, the more you build confidence; the more you put yourself out there, the more you learn because you're also teaching; the more you put yourself out there, the more risks you take. All of this is not just external growth of attracting people to you for whatever purpose; it's internal growth of becoming the better version of yourself.
So now I've shared that idea; the transcript is updating to VoicePal, and what I love—slightly different than other tools—is that because it's a ghostwriting app, it's taking the idea, it's kind of synthesizing it, making the text make sense—not just my ramble—and asking me follow-up questions. If you really want to create great content that resonates with people, you need to think about not just what your ideas are, but what the follow-up questions would be from others that you could then expand upon as you are in the ideation process. So let's say this is a halfway decent idea; the follow-up questions I can find out from VoicePal might be: "What specific experiences have you had that illustrate the connection between personal branding and internal growth?" Super interesting. The next one: "How do you define personal branding, and how does it differ from traditional marketing?" See, that one's like a good question, but not where I was trying to go with the original idea. "Can you share examples of risks you've taken that have contributed to your personal growth?" So what I like about this is it's helping me understand what it thinks I'm saying. While AI is not a person that might understand my inflection and my feeling and get another message from me as I told them this idea, they might ask similar questions to this because they haven't gotten all the way there with my idea. And when you're creating great content, you have to try really, really hard to close loops. So I basically take these follow-up questions that I'm seeing from VoicePal and asking myself, "Did I convey my original point well enough? And if I didn't, are these follow-up questions relevant?" So I want to make sure that this content goes in the right direction. I'm going to pick the question I feel like is most relevant to go next; that's going to help me continue to go down the rabbit hole of great content and also make the piece better. And all I got to do is tap on the question and answer it.
Well, really interestingly, I never thought I would be a professional public speaker, but because I created so many videos on the internet, I had people reaching out to me asking if I wanted to speak on stage. And I always find that really interesting that I was sitting in a room by myself talking to a camera, and event organizers liked what I had to say, thought the ideas were good, and wanted me to then get on stage and speak to thousands of people. Not exactly the same medium, but really interesting that by putting myself out there, it was also personally developing me on this skill of becoming a speaker. And I think that that is something that people are always trying to figure out: "How do I become a speaker? How do you get trained enough to do that?" All I did was put myself out there, and by getting really familiar with my content because I talked about it so much, I ended up being a much more natural speaker than I would have ever guessed, which got me past a lot of those initial tough fears about public speaking. So that's a good example I could come up with. So now I'm submitting that transcript. What I love is that you can do whatever you want from this point. VoicePal might do the job for you by the end of this conversation; you can then turn it into anything you want. You can put your newsletter format in there and turn it into a newsletter; you can also go with a journal entry or a Twitter post or a YouTube script. You choose different formats to take the idea and export it into something that you can then go and create in another medium. But if you don't want to stay here—let's say you like one of the other AI tools that I've suggested and you want to try those out because maybe you have a better relationship with another tool like I'm going to talk about in a little bit—the ideas that I'm putting into VoicePal and that are growing there can then be taken to another AI tool that can help massage it a little bit better into something that you love. I think regardless, you could finish the whole thing in any app; the more you use it, the better it gets to know you and your style and the direction you're going in. And so anytime you go to a tool that's just been really well trained on you and your lexicon, it's going to be a better result. So since I'm a little bit new to VoicePal, but it's been my first choice when I'm like, "I just want to talk to someone and flesh out this content idea," that's what I go to VoicePal for. And if I like the result here, I'll just export it and turn it into something, or I will take the transcripts from here or the summarized concepts that it gave me and put it into another tool. But simply the idea of having this conversation back and forth with VoicePal has made all of my ideas come out more strong in a YouTube video or in a newsletter.
And that leads me to number three: Claude. Claude is my dear friend. I feel like I have just gone on and on and on about Claude to everyone—to my coaching clients, to my husband, to my friends, to my family. I love Claude. I feel like this is where I started to build a deeper AI relationship in terms of being a content creator because I like the elegance of the writing and the outlining that's happening there. As I continue to use it, just from the beginning, it has been a great partner in content creation. So like I said, I have been taking a lot of VoicePal and putting it into Claude to really fine-tune some of those ideas that came out of that tool, but there are other times where I'll go straight to Claude and talk to Claude. All of the apps are so intuitive; it's a feeling that I have like, "Oh, I should go to VoicePal for this," or, "Oh, I should go to Claude for this." My biggest recommendation is you need to have multiple AI tools in your arsenal because you're going to want to play with them; you're going to want to see what different ones do and what different ones come up with. If you're in the groove with one of them, you want to keep going in and continuing on that track with it and making it better and getting a better result out of it. And sometimes I'm feeling like that with Claude; sometimes I'm feeling like that with VoicePal; sometimes I'm feeling like that with these other tools. And as long as you get what you need out of it, that's all that matters. But when it comes to Claude, I literally go to it for everything. My favorite project to go to in Claude is my YouTube content planning because in the project knowledge base it has some basics of what I like in my YouTube outline, so that it is always formatted in a way that I could sit down here and shoot and know it's going to come out perfect. It knows how I like to open my videos; it knows how I like to end my videos; it knows how I like to build tension in my videos; it knows how I like to call to action in my videos. So all of that being in there, I can just go to the chat and say, "Oh, I'm thinking about a video like this today; what can we come up with?"
So here's a real example of what I might do. Sometimes on my Q&A on Fridays on Instagram, people ask me what I use in my life to stay organized. So let's say I go to Claude and say, "Let's make a video about this; help me figure it out. I want to make a video about organizational tools and tips that I use in my everyday life based on what you know about me and what I've shared in previous content, and taking the project knowledge into consideration for formatting a high-performing YouTube video, create a rough draft outline." Like I said, my advantage here is going to be that I have done so much within Claude already that it helps me to understand how I would want to do it without me actually having to think about it to start. We're all great editors; we have a hard time starting with a blank slate; we all love to edit. So if we have something in front of us that helps us to become editors of what would have been our own first draft, we're already way ahead of the game and saving a ton of time. So here is the rough title: "How I Stay Organized: Five Game-Changing Tools and Systems That Actually Work." I've got a strong introduction here, and then I have my core content: calendar blocking—you know I love to talk about that—task management, digital organization, structure, physical space organization, habit tracking. Then I've got a couple of CTAs and a close. If you are in a pinch to make a video—which sometimes you just are as a content creator—that is an amazing first start. I'm going to take that outline; I'm going to move it over to where I like to finalize my video plans and make sure that I love it; change the script to sound more like me. But because I have given it so much information, it continues to be an amazing co-writing partner for content.
Speaking of which, I know I'm talking a lot about content creation around here; I've been on this YouTube channel for a long time, and I'd love it if you could help us reach a goal of 500,000 subscribers. If you haven't clicked subscribe already, thanks!
AI tool number four is Notion. You have heard me talk about Notion on this channel before because I love organizing things, and I'm a big fan of the PARA method—which is Thiago Forte's approach to organizing your life: projects, areas, resources, and archives. You can find out more about that system in a video that I made, but I go to Notion for literally everything: organizing all my projects, the different areas of my life, the resources like my Rolodex or the recipes that I love—everything is in Notion. So think about when you have that go-to place, like I do, and let's say you're planning a birthday party—like I'm about to plan a couple of birthday parties coming up. I've got those projects sitting there waiting for me to plan, but now I can leverage Notion AI so I don't have to do all the heavy lifting myself. Even better is my archive: I have an archive in Notion, so when I planned a birthday party last year, that card exists. I can leverage my archives plus Notion AI to come up with what my preferences are on what birthday parties look like and what we could do for the next one. Let's try it; by the way, that epiphany just occurred to me on camera. I just asked my assistant to plan that birthday party yesterday, and now I'm like, "Wait a minute… hm, hold on."
So as you can see, I have a basic project template here for planning my daughter's birthday parties, and so I'm going to come here; here and Command J is going to pull up the AI prompt, and we're going to say, "Brainstorm ideas of birthday party venues in Connecticut for one- and three-year-old children." Awesome. So we have a list of indoor play centers, which is what I am partial to; choosing different animal experiences; we have the zoo; we have the aquarium; nature options; creative activities; unique venues like the Imagination Station, and they all have the city next to them, so we know roughly about where they are. And I'm going to accept this idea. So now, instead of me going and doing that research myself, just by having the idea for the project, I can put it in my project database, and then I leverage Notion AI to help me have a head start on things I could be thinking about. And I can delete anything that's like, "Eh, we wouldn't go to Stamford; it's too far away." So no to that. You can start to edit it down to what you might actually like. We get stuck with so many projects in our head because we know there are going to be multiple steps—which is why they are projects and not just tasks—and so then we don't even think about them until it's so late, and you're doing everything last minute, and you're not planning it to the best of your ability. Let AI help you figure out how to get started thinking about something and open up those areas of your brain so you're actually excited to think about it; you don't have to do all the work yourself. These tools are amazing and will help you.
Number five is ChatGPT. I feel like this is just always the one that people are talking about, and they seem like a great resource. So when I think of ChatGPT, I just think, "I want to solve or come up with the answer to a question," almost like I'm going to Google. Like, remember when we used to go to Google? Now we go to AI. By the way, Google has great AI responses too, 'cause I do default to that sometimes, and I'm like, "Oh yeah, there's something really helpful here at the top of Google that's actually the right answer." But whenever I need to like unpack something in my brain that's driving me crazy, I tend to go to ChatGPT. To give you an example, I recently went to ChatGPT when I was like, "I'm taking a few supplements, and I talked to my medical provider; I've made all these decisions very carefully, but I'm going to ask ChatGPT what all of the benefits are of everything I'm taking and if there's anything overlapping because I want to know that." And all I did was take pictures of all of those supplements, upload them to ChatGPT, and ask for an analysis of that, and it was great because then I went on to have a conversation of, "Okay, well, here are some things that I could use more help with. So if I was going to ask a medical provider for help—which you should; you should always talk to your doctor before you take anything—what might I inquire about in terms of solving certain problems in my life? Like, if I wasn't sleeping very well…" Okay, I am sleeping well, but if I wasn't, what is a supplement that might be a good option for that, so I can ask my doctor about it. And that was really useful for me to just have that conversation. I felt much more aware of why I was coming up with these ideas and not just some random idea that came from Google; it was taking into consideration what I already had in my regimen, what the effect already was going to be for my body per its own awareness and the very limited awareness that it has of my body, and then giving me a recommendation to inspect with my medical provider as a next step. That was extremely useful to me. I don't know that I would have even inquired about that; I would have gone to a doctor in the past and tried to have that conversation: "Can you tell me what's in all of these things? Is it okay? Are they overlapping?" And I don't know if we're always going to get as clear of an answer as we do from AI. And I got that information very quickly. In the case that maybe I would have been taking something unnecessarily without knowing it because of a multivitamin, maybe checked off a box I didn't know about, then I could have limited some of those things. But it turned out to be a really good and enlightening conversation; gave me more awareness of the things that I am doing to support my health, and I feel like that's what I'm going to ChatGPT for: saving myself time about things that might be problems to solve in my head, but I don't want to get hyper-focused on them, and I'm not really sure of the first way to go about figuring it out. That's why I go to ChatGPT.
I feel like the example of: if you're not using AI yet, no matter which tool you choose, I like this one as a start: just practice integrating ChatGPT into your life. What questions do you have? How am I going to balance this? How do I get this done and that done? How do I make this happen? Just the normal things that drive you crazy that are just bumbling around in that brain of yours, just put it into ChatGPT and see if it gives you an answer that helps give you a little bit of guidance. By simply doing that, you start to crack open the part of your brain that understands how AI can be useful to you. Some of the earlier tools that I talked about are very content creator, business-heavy, and so if that doesn't help you with productivity in your day-to-day life, then you're not going to start thinking in the ways that would help you come to the conclusion that AI could be helpful to you. The more you go to it to ask questions and explore, the more genuinely curious that you are, the more you're going to see the opportunity and how it can be useful to you and how it can save you more time.
My final AI tool is Reclaim.ai. On a consistent basis that now I don't even have to schedule out myself; they just get booked automatically by Reclaim.ai. We should not have to make hours of time per week to just make sure our calendar is correct. It is so easy to manage this with AI and very useful for someone who doesn't necessarily have someone managing their schedule, like if you had an assistant. Reclaim.ai—my deep work time—that is just such a massive game changer in my workflow, especially when I only give two full-time dedicated days to my business at this point in time. That's all I can do; I have a baby at home with me, and those are the two days that I get, and the rest of the time I balance work with her. This is the season of life I'm in with her; I'm leveraging tools to help me make the most of the time that I have intentionally. I think the biggest time-saving benefit to Reclaim is that it's going to limit that decision-making fatigue. So if you make the decision today, "I'm going to go to the gym on these days," set it up in Reclaim and have it be on your calendar, held so you book your life around it. If you say you want to create a certain amount of content on a regular basis, then put that in there as a habit, and Reclaim is going to protect that time for you if you set the settings correctly. I have a whole video talking about how you can leverage Reclaim to be the absolute best-performing result for you, so check that out if you want to go down that road.
Whether you want to try one of these tools and you don't know where to start, or there's another one that you're thinking about, I have a simple AI decision-making framework for you: ask yourself these questions. Number one: Does it save me more time to use this tool than it takes for me to learn how to use it? If we want it to be a timesaver, then we can't be spending so much time inside of a tool just learning how to make it work properly. That being said, the more you use something, the better it can be, but if it's not intuitive from the start for you, bail on it; choose something else. Number two: Does the tool enhance your thinking or just automate tasks? You want this to be an extension of your brain, not just give you more to do. And number three: Does this tool integrate well with your existing workflow? Using an AI tool shouldn't just be because it's hip and fun; it should be because it works for your life to be better and more efficient. Every time you're looking at a new tool, especially before you commit financially, go through this framework and really analyze if it's the right one for you. That's my breakdown of my favorite AI tools to start saving you time. If you want to go deeper on my PARA organization method in Notion, click the link here, and I'll see you there.