How AI Can Supercharge Your Favorite Productivity Frameworks

AI is rewriting all of our standard productivity techniques. I’ve already written that it will spell the end of organizing, but what about applying it to other classic standbys, like the Eisenhower matrix and the Pomodoro technique? Read this guide from Stella Garber—former head of marketing at Trello—if you want to learn how to maximize your favorite productivity hack with AI. —Dan Shipper

NOTE: I’m speaking on a creator panel at New York Tech week this Wednesday afternoon, along with a16z’s Steph Smith, Gumroad’s Sahil Lavingia, and Numlock’s Walt Hickey. If you’re interested in attending, register here:

A few years ago, as the head of marketing at Trello, I found myself constantly “firefighting” at work. Even though I’d start each day with a clear set of priorities and tasks, invariably the pings would start rolling in from Slack. Why didn’t the contract get signed by the due date? Where are the adjusted budgets for next quarter’s campaign? Which audience are we targeting for the current enterprise campaign?

Answering all of these “urgent” questions required coordinating with multiple people and cross-referencing documents spread across different tools. Most frustrating of all, it yanked me out of whatever I had set as my goal for the day. I found myself being pulled into impromptu meetings and having to set aside quiet time in the evenings to do focused work. There wasn’t enough time in the workday to actually do my work.

It’s no surprise I began to feel the effects of burnout.

The modern workplace has become significantly more distracting and interruptive in recent years. If you sit in front of a computer each day, you likely endure an endless barrage of pings and dings from Slack, your email, and constant calendar invitations. Organizational researcher Rob Cross, who wrote the book Beyond Collaboration Overload, found that collaborative demands on time—such as brainstorming meetings, draft reviews, and momentary gut-checks—have increased more than 50 percent in the past two decades as barriers to collaboration have decreased (and even more so since the pandemic).

Artificial intelligence could ameliorate some of these problems. It could simplify the collaborative burden we put on others and help us get through our own to-do lists. That is, if only we actually knew how to use it.

I’ve spent more than a decade helping people be more productive at work—first, running marketing at Trello (which was bought by Atlassian), and now building my own artificial intelligence startup, Hoop. Through these experiences, I’ve found one overarching theme that pervades the thousands of conversations I’ve had with people about their work and time: Most of us want to manage our time better and be more productive at work, but that doesn’t mean we have all the answers, let alone a good system for ensuring productivity and efficiency.

As AI becomes impossible to ignore at work, tried-and-true organizational systems are begging for a refresh. We’ll go through four of the most popular—the GTD method, the Eisenhower matrix, time blocking, and the Pomodoro method—and consider how artificial intelligence could super-charge them both for their adherents and the millions of people who can never quite stick to one system to get them through the day. 

How to get things done

First published in 2001, David Allen’s book Getting Things Done quickly gained popularity for its promise to both eliminate stress and increase productivity. His method has one simple idea: Get everything out of your head and put it somewhere else where you can organize it. When I worked at Trello, I encountered tons of Getting Things Done, or GTD, acolytes who swore by this structured method. So how do you get started? There are five stages:

1. Capture: Write down everything in your head
2. Clarify: Expand on what each item means and how you want to approach it
3. Organize: Sort different tasks into projects and define subtasks
4. Reflect: Make sure what you’ve created reflects your intentions
5. Engage: Actually do the thing!

Like any good framework, GTD brings order to the chaos of work bouncing around in our brains. There are lots of great ways to implement it, as explained in the book and subsequent resources. It’s also somewhat tool-agnostic, so you can pick whichever system you prefer to make it work, be it pen and paper or your favorite project management software.

AI power-up: Use AI to capture information

AI-powered note-taking tools like Supernormal, Fathom, and Otter can eliminate step one by extracting summaries and action items from meeting recordings. In a previous era, you might have had a project manager or executive assistant sit in on a meeting and take notes. But now, these tools automate that job by having a bot attend meetings and send out notes afterward.

Other tools automatically capture data elsewhere. Hoop captures activity across Slack, your meetings, and soon email while Limitless uses a wearable pin-like device that’s present throughout all of your daily in-person activities. Arc, a web browser that launched in 2022, has also hinted that AI capture is part of its near-term product roadmap. These tools could allow workers to forgo the mental and physical energy needed to remember tasks and write them down, which can add up if you’re in a lot of meetings every single day.

Capture is just the first step of the GTD framework. Eventually, AI might also help with all five steps: auto-tagging and grouping tasks, analyzing your workload and suggesting how to prioritize tasks, and—finally—doing the tasks for you.

Working the Eisenhower way

In 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower said, “I have two kinds of problems: the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.” As president and during his storied military tenure, Eisenhower was known for being ruthless with his time management.

The Eisenhower matrix, codified by Stephen Covey in his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, teaches us to distinguish between the important and the urgent. Unfortunately, we often get off track because we prioritize things that are urgent yet unimportant rather than those tasks that are important but less urgent.

We can borrow from Eisenhower’s work ethic by thinking of our own work as a matrix with urgency and importance on the two axes. Therefore work can be:

• Important and urgent → Do these first
• Important but not urgent → Consider scheduling these
• Not important but urgent → Delegate
• Not important and not urgent → Most likely this is a distraction

Once we start sorting tasks according to this framework, we can begin to reconsider what we’re really spending our time and energy doing, and start to course-correct.

The Eisenhower matrix helps us prioritize longer-term projects that require our focus but don’t release the short-term dopamine hits that often come from checking urgent but unimportant tasks off our to-do list.