AI Tips for Everyday Productivity — How to Use AI to Reclaim Your Time (TPS604)

What It Covers

Tan and Brooks break down practical AI tool usage across five platforms — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Notebook LM — covering real workflows for research, content creation, lead enrichment, and SEO audits, plus a three-level framework for progressively integrating AI into daily work.

Key Questions Answered

• •Multi-tool specialization: No single AI tool handles everything well. Use ChatGPT as a daily driver, Claude for coding and Excel analysis, Gemini for image and video generation, and Perplexity for real-time research and social media sentiment analysis. Matching each tool to its strength produces significantly better results than defaulting to one platform for all tasks.
• •Context files as AI assets: Create plain text files containing your writing style, voice, values, and business details. Load these into any LLM session to eliminate repetitive re-explaining. Maintain separate context files per medium — LinkedIn posts, professional email, personal email — so the AI writes in the correct register without additional prompting each time.
• •Closing the feedback loop: When editing AI-generated content, make all revisions inside the chat interface rather than in Word or Gmail. After four to five rounds of in-chat corrections, the model learns your preferences. Alternatively, paste your final edited version back into the chat and instruct it to analyze and internalize your style for future outputs.
• •Three-level AI progression: Level one is AI-assisted prompting — the model advises but you execute. Level two is AI workflows — tools connect to Gmail or calendars and perform actions directly. Level three is AI agents — a digital employee monitors your inbox, cross-references your calendar, and pre-drafts replies for human approval before sending, reclaiming significant daily time.
• •Perplexity Computer for autonomous research: Perplexity's agent feature runs multi-step tasks autonomously across the web. One prompt enriched hundreds of business leads — pulling company size, location, and contact data — without manual intervention. The tool also supports source filtering, allowing queries restricted to social media or Reddit only, making targeted sentiment analysis faster than any standard LLM search.