Artificial Intelligence and Productivity… what sort of impact will it have in the workplace?

We recently explored AI’s soon-to-be impact on your personal productivity, health, and well-being. But what about your work? What about life in the office?

OR as the case often is… how tech and AI make having an office irrelevant.

It’s an interesting time to be alive, that is for sure. On the one hand, we have access to more opportunities than ever before. The fact we’re able to access the type of information we can is mind-blowing. Still, despite this, it’s an overwhelming point in history where technology and society evolve at a pace our mere human mind is unable to maintain.

We are organic. We evolve slowly. The world around us does not!

and AI is set to make things a whole lot worse in that regard.

It sends us into a frenzy, feeling overwhelmed and over-consumed. Time seems to slip through our fingers as we pursue cliches like success, happiness, and the all-American dream.

AI offers us the potential to reclaim time. Yet it also has the power to take it away, pushing us further into the hustle and grind. So, artificial intelligence and productivity … will it help or hinder? Well, that truly is the question.

Artificial Intelligence and Productivity

As with most things in life, artificial intelligence and productivity will come together in good ways and bad. Much of it will come down to you and how YOU leverage the tools in front of you.

This is nothing new. Take any kind of technology and it houses pros and cons.

Social media, for example, is an incredible advancement that connects us with the world and allows us to grow as individuals. Yet it’s also a toxic cesspool of guilt, procrastination, comparison culture, and “the hustle”.

AI is no different. There are good parts to it and bad.

Some tools will help you whereas others won’t—many will simultaneously offer both.

It all comes down to you and how you 1) perceive it, and 2) approach it.

Yet when it comes to artificial intelligence and productivity, there’s a strange piece to the puzzle to consider. Because on the one hand, if AI takes control in the ways we expect, will something like productivity even matter in the future?

After all, AI is the thing doing the work, giving you lots of time back. So much so that time itself may become a resource we can flippantly waste without worry.

Yet on the other hand, time may become more precious than ever as AI gives us the freedom to step back … slow down … look around us, and truly appreciate life for what it is.

At the moment, many of us don’t have this privilege.

There’s too much to do, as we constantly move from one task to the next—we just don’t have the time and bandwidth to properly reflect and take it all in. 

If AI presents us with this gift, and assuming we grasp it with both hands, maybe just maybe we’ll treasure life in new ways, giving fresh meaning to each precious moment we’re given.

I sense much of this will come down to you as an individual.

and how you leverage AI and its many tools…

So let’s dive into a few ways AI will positively impact your productivity in the workplace, so you can get ahead of the curve and begin to effectively align artificial intelligence and productivity…

1: Remove Repetition

It doesn’t matter what your job is, each day you end up doing certain things over and over. Maybe it’s a type of email or response. Maybe a series of small steps. Maybe a process you know so well that you can do it when half-asleep. Such repetition tends to dilute us. We grow frustrated having to do the same thing again and again and again. Worse, it often leads to complacency that in turn increases the likelihood of mistakes and errors.

In the future, you likely won’t have to do such repetitive tasks. AI will do it for you.

This not only saves you time but decreases the potential for silly errors. More so, it frees you from doing a task you hate, which means you have the mental bandwidth to focus more deeply on the tasks that do matter. This leads you to find and work in flow more often.

2: Efficient Research

As a writer by art and trade, I often have to do some kind of research before I put pen to paper—or finger to keyboard as the case is these days.

Chances are you have to follow a similar process of having to do a thing before you can do the actual thing you need to do. Often, this takes time, attention, focus, and energy. If we use me and my writing as an example once more, I can spend far more time reading other people’s words than I do writing my own. That’s frustrating, and frankly counter-productive. Yet I have little choice because research is almost always necessary.

AI won’t change that. However, AI could cut the time spent on this in half (at the very least). Maybe I don’t need to read the whole book, only access ten pages. Maybe I don’t need to consume an entire article but rather skim over a short summary. Maybe an hour-long video houses five minutes in the middle I need. With AI’s help, I can cut through the noise.

You can too. Whatever the annoying thing is, AI acts as a filter. You’ll still have to do the work, research, study, and learn… you just won’t spend nearly as much time doing it.

3: Redundant Communication

Each day, you spend large chunks of your day communicating with other people—often through email, texts, DM threads, and whatever else. Some of it’s important. Most of it… NOT!

The same applies to meetings. Often, we don’t need to attend them or listen to the entire recording. Yet we do because we need to access part of the conversation.

AI already makes much of this unnecessary. From tools that summarize meetings to those that reply to emails based on your past communication, you no longer have to waste so much time on redundant chats, conversations, and endless threads.

This is huge, not only saving you time in general but giving you the energy to go deeper into the conversations you do have. Quality over quantity, if you will… that’s rarely a bad thing.

4: Initial Momentum

Most days, I open my laptop and spend at least a few moments staring at a white blank screen.

It haunts me; taunts me, even!

A common issue for writers, but most people face a similar struggle. From starting a new project to simply easing into the day, it’s rarely easy to build momentum. We are human, after all. We cannot flip a switch and just engage our creativity. It takes time and a little patience.

AI doesn’t have to grapple with this. It flips a switch and just like that… results.

We can use this to our advantage. Instead of staring at the page for ten minutes, I can lean on AI to start so I have something to edit, tweak, and build upon. Rather than waiting for your brain to click into gear, you can task AI to generate dozens of ideas from a single prompt.

A huge time-saver, but also one that transforms how we use our time. Productivity shouldn’t be about how much you get done, but rather what you get done. With AI’s help, we can become much more effective as well as efficient. 

5: Increased Learning

After much thought, I’m still unsure if this is a positive. When it comes to learning, many of us use it as a distraction and a form of procrastination. It’s easier to learn a little about a lot than become a master at one or two things. The latter takes a lot of commitment.

Despite this, we live in a wonderful period of time. Unlike any other generation, we have access to knowledge on unrivaled levels. With a single swipe or voice command, we can gather a “good enough” level of knowledge in almost any topic.

AI is set to take this to new levels.

Until now, we still had to read the book or watch the video. Soon, AI can summarize entire collections into a nice neat pile for you to consume. It’s difficult to imagine just where this will take education. It will offer both the good and the bad, I am sure.

But it’s rarely a negative to learn new things. An increased capacity to learn allows us—at least in theory—to make better, more informed decisions. This in turn leads to less ignorance, which has the potential to bring us much closer together as a species.

(again… in theory!)

6: Personalized Advice

This is another pro that turns into a con if you squint in such a way.

AI already knows us on a deep level. There are tools that have access to our behaviors and are capable of forming VERY impressive patterns—both on the macro and micro levels. Yet we’ve only scratched the surface. Soon, AI will know you better than you know yourself (a lot more!).

Placing the downsides of this to one side for a second —and there are obvious negatives— this will lead AI to give us more personalized advice. We’ll no longer have to consume generalized advice that serves many. Instead, AI will give us access to only what we need; in fact, it will soon create advice from scratch just for us.

The potential impact of this is huge. From your health to productivity to simply how you approach your day… AI will guide you along the way. Not with generalized advice that may or may not help, but hyper-focused steps for you and only you.

Artificial Intelligence and Productivity—Your Next Step

Artificial intelligence and productivity in the workplace are set to enter a new frontier.

It’s difficult to know what’s to come because of the exponential progress of technology. This always makes it hard to appreciate what’s around the corner, but the rules are being rewritten as you read this because the nature of AI makes it unfathomable to us.

Its capacity to learn and progress and evolve isn’t on a level we can comprehend.

So I have no idea what will happen. Nobody does. And that’s scary as hell.

Yet it’s also an opportunity for you and me to embrace this new path as best as we can. The reality is, we don’t need to know all the answers; we don’t need to know what will happen. All we can focus on is what’s in front of us—this is a huge part of the [no hustle] philosophy.

What’s obvious is that AI WILL impact our productivity—in good and less so ways.

All you can take is keep your eyes open and be conscious of its impact. Don’t allow it to take the wheel. Keep hold of it and remain the person in charge of your world. With this, you can use the influx of new AI tools to your advantage. You’ll save time. You will reclaim more time. You will change your entire relationship with work so the impact you have dives to new, exciting depths.

So I encourage you to take some time today to step back and think about the role AI currently plays in your productivity. How does it already impact your work and how you structure your day? What do you like about this? What don’t you like? From there, take action. If you do, you’ll stay ahead of the curve, my friend.

hi, i’m turndog and I wrote this article … i am a writer, ghostwriter, anti-hustler & a guy on a mission to ensure you too escape the hustle — come be part of the [no hustle] movement