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Writer's pictureBrian Hunt Coleman

The Power of an Extra Hour, Part Two: Automating Tedious Tasks with AI Tools

In our first post in the “The Power of an Extra Hour” series, we talked about how AI tools can be leveraged for time-management purposes including indentifying you areas of inefficiency, managing your calendar, and optimizing your to-do list.


In this follow-up piece, we will cover concrete recommendations on how to use AI-powered tools for remarkable productivity gains. We will see how AI can help automate a range of mundane tasks, from creating content to organizing your data, freeing you up to spend more time on big picture strategic thinking. As we show, incorporating these tools in your workflow can reduce mistakes and increase your speed. The goal of this article is to give actionable tips on using AI tools both to save time and to improve the quality of your work.


The Most Common Time Wasting Activities


Before we plunge too much into a particular tool, let’s talk about some of the biggest time wasting activities:


  1. Content Creation: newsletters, tweets, reports, etc.

  2. Admin Work: emails, scheduling calls

  3. Graphic Design: website graphics, presentations

  4. Customer Engagement: social media messages

  5. Data Entry and Management: spreadsheet upkeep


AI tools can be employed to handle many mundane tasks associated with these activities, freeing you up to focus on more important creative and strategic aspects of your work. By automatically performing mundane functions like data input, email triage, content development, and customer interactions, AI lets you spend more time on sophisticated thinking and original projects. Moreover, AI tools complete these repetitive tasks quickly and with precision, thereby reducing the likelihood of human error and increasing overall productivity. Because you get to devote your time to activities that demand human judgment and imagination, the quality, and not just the quantity, of your work improves. By using AI to deal with the ordinary aspects of your workflow, you can strike a different balance and thereby deliver more transformative and meaningful work.


Gaining Significant Efficiencies


Now, we'll delve into specific steps you can take and tools you can use to reclaim wasted time in these areas.


Content Creation


Content creation is a crucial aspect of many businesses, but it can be incredibly time-consuming. Several AI tools can assist in this area, each offering unique features to streamline the process and improve efficiency.


Blogify uses AI to assist in creating high-quality blog posts, social media updates, and other written content. Start by inputting keywords related to your niche, and Blogify will suggest trending topics and content ideas, ensuring your content remains relevant and engaging. Once you have your topic, use Blogify's AI-powered drafting feature to generate a first draft. This feature uses advanced natural language processing to create content that aligns with your outline and style preferences. After generating a draft, Blogify can provide grammar checks, style suggestions, and SEO optimization tips, ensuring that your content is not only well-written but also optimized for search engines.


MyCopyHub is another powerful tool for content creation. This platform leverages AI to generate compelling copy for a variety of needs, from blog posts and articles to marketing materials and social media updates. MyCopyHub stands out with its ability to adapt to your unique voice and style, creating content that feels personalized and authentic. The tool offers features like keyword integration, SEO optimization, and real-time collaboration, making it a comprehensive solution for content creators. By using MyCopyHub, you can quickly generate high-quality content that resonates with your audience and drives engagement.


BypassPen adds another layer of efficiency to content creation. This AI-powered tool is designed to handle repetitive writing tasks such as drafting emails, reports, and standard business documents. BypassPen excels in generating structured content with a consistent tone, which can be particularly useful for businesses that require frequent production of similar documents. Additionally, BypassPen integrates with your existing tools and platforms, allowing for seamless automation of content-related tasks.


Using AI for Content Creation:


  1. Topic Generation: Start by inputting keywords related to your niche. Both Blogify and MyCopyHub will suggest trending topics and content ideas, ensuring your content remains relevant and engaging.

  2. AI-Powered Drafting: Use the AI-powered drafting features to generate a first draft. These tools use advanced natural language processing to create content that aligns with your outline and style preferences.

  3. Editing and Refinement: Blogify and MyCopyHub provide grammar checks, style suggestions, and SEO optimization tips. This ensures that your content is not only well-written but also optimized for search engines.

  4. Personalization and Voice: MyCopyHub's ability to adapt to your unique voice and style ensures that the generated content feels personalized and authentic, enhancing reader engagement and trust.

  5. Streamlined Writing Tasks: BypassPen automates repetitive writing tasks, producing structured content with a consistent tone, and integrates smoothly with your existing tools to enhance overall efficiency.


By utilizing Blogify, MyCopyHub, and BypassPen, you can significantly cut down the time required to produce engaging content, allowing you to focus on strategy and creativity. This is particularly useful for maintaining a consistent publishing schedule without the typical stress and time commitment.


Admin Work


Doing existing manual tasks such as email processing or appointment scheduling can consume large amounts of valuable time. Luckily, AI tools can help automate or facilitate such tasks for you, allowing you to concentrate on high value work.


CleanEmail is an email management service that enables you to sort through, thunderbird microsoft tasks, and clean up your inbox using smart algorithms to the emails stored in your email server's database. When you are using CleanEmail, you benefit from the following features:


  • Inbox Cleaning: CleanEmail can quickly identify and categorize emails in your inbox into newsletters, social network notifications, or promotions.

  • Bulk Actions: You can perform bulk actions on large sets of emails through CleanEmail like unsubscribing from a ton of newsletters at once, deleting thousands of old emails in a click, and applying or canceling rules to a bunch of emails at the same time.

  • Privacy and Security: CleanEmail honors user privacy and protects your email data.


Boomerang's Respondable AI service is a nice compliment to CleanEmail because helps you write better emails and sometimes even drafts replies on your behalf that sound as if you’ve written them. It uses artificial neural networks to analyze email text as you type with real time feedback on how to make it better to increase the likelihood of a reply. When you choose to use Boomerang Respondable, you can rely on its:


  • Instant Feedback: Boomerang Respondable provides instant feedback on your emails. Tips may range from improving the subject line, to suggesting an appropriate email length, to advising on the use of words that increase the response rate.

  • Dynamic Responses: Boomerang also offers to write responses for you, based on your chosen style and typical email conversation style. This feature can save you hours of responding to email.

  • Automatic Reminders: Respondable can generate reminders when people don’t reply after a certain period of time, prompting you to write back to an email recipient and thus further saving you time.


CleanEmail and Boomerang Respondable offer tangible solutions for automating and simplifying the overhead around email. By adopting them as a part of your regular workflow, you can keep your inbox in check, spend less time on email, and direct your attention to higher-level work where you add the most value.


Graphic Design


One of the key ways to draw and hold attention to your brand is through compelling visuals. Nowadays, high-quality graphics can greatly enhance the effectiveness of your marketing, the engagement on your social media, and the image of your brand. For marketing teams pulled in many directions, effectiveness becomes all the more crucial. Creating beautiful designs is an arduous endeavor, even for the most talented designers. By entrusting the execution to AI tools such as Artisse and Adcreative.ai and focusing on the strategic and creative side of their work, the marketing team can get a significant boost in productivity. With Artisse, you have the power of generating completely new images, carrying such images to completion, and using professional designs, all powered by cutting-edge AI technology. Here’s how Artisse can revolutionize your graphic design:


  • Image Generation: Describe what you want, and Artisse will create it. Be it a sketch of something one-of-a-kind, say a dog that glows, or a more ordinary image, Artisse's AI can produce the image you want. Creating unique images like these can help you stand out from the competition.

  • Image Completion: Upload your substandard images for Artisse to complete them. The AI can remove or modify the background to creatively enhance your photos, making them appear professionally edited even if you have no design skills or do not own expensive image editing software. Develop something special from our takeover team by making your images pop with unique colors and a professional design to make them fit for your marketing materials.

  • Professional Design: Select from a variety of professional designs to create an engaging and professional image for social media, blogging, or marketing. Your images will have a consistent look and feel tailored to your brand and fit for the next marketing campaign.


Adcreative.ai is a similar AI tool that specializes in generating high-performance ads quickly. Adcreative.ai is designed to help you make attractive ads that will drive traffic and conversions, thus saving you time and resources.


  • Advertisements: Walk the system through your goals, audience, and key messages. Adcreative.ai generates ad copy and visuals for ads ready to engage and convert your customers.

  • A/B Testing: Automatically run A/B tests to identify the ads that work best. Get your campaign back on track without delay!

  • Insights: Get data-driven insights to continually optimize your ads and improve your ROI. Understand what works in your ad and what need improving.


These AI Tools are Irreplaceable. Artisse and Adcreative.ai are designed for smaller businesses and individuals with limited access to professional design help. They offer affordable alternatives to quickly create attractive images, ads in particular, which can instantly improve your brand’s image and following. With Artisse and Adcreative.ai you can create ads that enrich your message without having to forget about design.


By using Artisse and Adcreative.ai as part of your design flow, you can ensure that you always have top-notch graphics and ads on hand to help you attract customers, engage them, and ultimately meet your business goals.


Customer Engagement


It may take a long time and be challenging to respond to comments on social media, but in a rapidly moving digital world, people increasingly expect fast and effective communication. Failing to interact in real-time can lead to missed opportunities as well as unmet user expectations. AI tools can improve your efficiency in dealing with your customers and free up your time for important strategic work.


For example, ChatGPT can bolster your capability to engage with customers and generate automatic responses to support requests:

  • Effective Direct Messaging: Real-Time Comment Management:Any organization benefits from keeping its community polite and free of spam. ChatGPT can automatically moderate comments on your content, hide spam, and block unwanted content to ensure a positive experience for all followers.

  • Spam Filtering: Spam filters in ChatGPT can automatically weed out and discard spam to help maintain a clean and positive conversation.

  • Direct Message Automation: ChatGPT workflows can be used to automate direct messaging. An organization can use these workflows to welcome new followers, notify customers about the status of an order, or keep individuals posted about upcoming sales.

  • Personalized Outreach: Using CRM information and ChatGPT, a business can send customized messages to customers to maintain and deepen a relationship.


Brand24's real-time listening capabilities also aids with customer engagement:

  1. Define Influencers: By keeping track of all mentions of your brand on social networks and the web at large, Brand24 can help identify the individuals whose opinions matter most to your audience.

  2. Keep Your Eye on the Ball: Perform sentiment analysis on all mentions of your brand to identify trends in your customer base.

  3. Understand Your Stakeholders: By tracking and analyzing all mentions of your brand, Brand24 can yield insights into what your customers care about and what your brand and its competitors mean to them.

  4. Monitor Product Sentiment: If a product is receiving negative attention, learn about it quickly by staying on top of product sentiment trends.

  5. Crisis Management for Brand mention crises: Alongside your reaction playbook, use access to real time mentions of your brand to assess the potential impact of an unfolding crisis.


Use of ChatGPT and Brand24 in Customer Engagement:

  • More Responsive Customer Engagement: Manually interacting with followers or customers is time-consuming. Automate responses using ChatGPT and respond to updates and crises detected by Brand24 in real time.

  • Everything Is Routine: Although AI handles customers, everything happens according to policy and brand guidelines. This consistent communication can boost reputation and user development.

  • Time Allocation: AI messaging tools and Brand24 handle the routine and repetitive components of customer relations and leave you to handle the important stuff.

  • Direct Insight into Customer Responses: ChatGPT sends you real time updates about interactions with customers; Brand24 offers detailed analysis of all mentions of your brand.


In essence, ChatGPT and Brand24 provide you with tools to maintain a vigorous presence on social media, deploy automation where necessary, keep up with—and even get ahead of—customer requests, complaints and suggestions, all without spending your entire day on your social profiles.


Data Entry and Management


Effortless data management is essential for anyone trying to get things done, whether at work or in everyday life. But manually managing spreadsheets and tracking graphs can be extremely tedious. Luckily, there’s a tool called Zapier. It allows you to automate much of the work involved in managing data and smoothens your processes (and life). Check out what Zapier can do for you.


Automate Your Data Management Tasks with Zapier:


Build Workflows:

  • Automatic Data Transfers: Zapier helps automate transferring information from one app to the other, thus reducing manual data entry. For example, you can create a workflow where each new email subscriber gets automatically added to a Google Sheets spreadsheet. The records in this sheet get updated without you doing anything.

  • Integrate Data with Your Business Processes: Through workflows, Zapier lets you keep your data in sync across all systems. Changes in one system immediately appear in the others.


Use It with Numerous Platforms:

  • A Plethora of App Integrations: Zapier integrates with more than 2,000 apps, including Google Sheets, Slack, Trello, and Salesforce. You can direct the data flow among these apps and into whichever platform you prefer.

  • Automation Across Platforms: Whether data on customers needs to be synchronized across your CRM and email marketing platform, or into your project management tool, Zapier handles all these tasks, making sure your data stays up to date.


Automate Mundane Data Management Tasks:

  • Reusable Zaps: You can automate your repeated tasks by creating Zaps that keep running. For instance, if you collect leads through a web form on a regular basis, a Zap could automatically feed them to your CRM and trigger a follow-up email

  • Automate Schedules: Apart from automating events, you can also plan your Zaps. Schedule sending your weekly report with Zapier or updating your tool's database every day or hour.


Setup Triggers and Actions:

  • Create Your Own Automation: With Zapier, you can create workflows with triggers and actions that make sense for you. For example, using a trigger such as receiving a new email, a Zap can create an action like adding appointment information to your calendar.

  • Custom Use Cases: Zapier’s triggers and actions enable you to create automations that are specific to your workflows. Say you want a Zap to trigger when a customer buys something: Actions might include updating your inventory system and sending a thank-you email.


Benefits of using Zapier to manage data:

  • Save Time: Automating tasks helps you cut the time you would spend on them. Save time on repetitive tasks and spend it on strategic decisions.

  • Reduce Errors: Manual tasks are often error-prone. Automated Zaps cut errors from your processes.

  • Scale Your Efforts: Scaling manual processes is hard. Automation makes it easy. When your business grows, the automation grows with you.


When you let Zapier manage your data, you get current, accurate, and accessible information. To say this in another way, with better data, you can make better choices. And that’s good news for you.


What's Next?


In this installment of our series on “The Power of an Extra Hour”, you've learned how AI tools can enormously amplify your effectiveness by automating an array of work-intensive tasks. Whether it’s producing quality content with Blogify, MyCopyHub, BypassPen, managing your administration with CleanEmail, Boomerang, or making great visuals with Artisse, Adcreative.ai, these tools help you streamline your workflow and save time. And by integrating customer engagement tools - like ChatGPT and Brand24 - they can help you keep an active and responsive online presence, even when you’re weighed down with other things. Finally, tools like Zapier help you automate data management by seamlessly integrating various apps and workflows, ensuring that information is updated and transferred without manual intervention.


In the final post in this series, we will go one step further to see how you can use AI as a strategic thought partner to amplify the impact of your efforts - to turn AI not just into a tool, but into a true collaborator in your work. Stay with us to find out more about the sophisticated tricks to unlock the value of AI and how they can help you become even more productive.


A man in a hang glider flying over a river with mountains on either side. There are several other hang gliders ahead of him in the distance.


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