AI Tools for Productivity in 2025

Let's face it, sometimes little things can have a big impact. That's why in today's episode, I am going to share five AI tools I use for productivity, all within the Google Suite. Five tools. Let's dive into the first one. The first tool and workflow I use inside Google Suite gets me to Inbox zero in less than five minutes. In that in the example I have for you today, I went from over 4,000 unread emails that doesn't even include my read emails to 0 emails in my inbox in less than 5 minutes. This isn't something I do every week, every day, throughout the year. I generally don't worry about my email too much. But let's face it, every now and then it's nice to get things cleaned up, freshened up to give you that feeling of a fresh start so you can build momentum. So I'm going to walk you through exactly how I I do this. Now let's take a look. So what do I do when I Want to achieve Inbox Zero? I actually go to the email over at Amber McHugh.com called Inbox Zero in less than five minutes. I don't regularly want to achieve Inbox Zero. It's not something I strive for every single week. But every now and then when I want to clear distractions, I want to get focused. I absolutely go in and clear out my inbox. And it's actually been a while so we're going to do this together Right now you can see there, I pop in this label, this filter called Pull up everything in the inbox and search for all of those emails. Then I want to go ahead and I want to create a filter with this in mind. So it is everything in the inbox and I'm creating the filter with this in mind. Now this is a notification confirm creating filter. It is not recommended to do something with everything in the inbox because it never matches incoming mail. That's actually okay with me for this purpose because this isn't a filter I'm going to keep on forever. This is a filter I'm applying now temporarily just to clean up my inbox, knowing that I'm generally caught up on everything that I need to action on. It's just got a little cluttered with things that do not require my time. So when that filter is applied, I'm going to say I want to skip the inbox, but. But we know we're not going to do that long term. But most importantly is to apply the filter to matching conversations. So that'll take everything that's already in your inbox and it's going to clear it out. So we're applying the search for all emails in the inbox to applied matching conversations. Let's create this filter now so you can see this in action. Okay, it looks like nothing's happening, but sometimes there are so many emails it is actively happening while we are waiting and do not see action. So I'm going to give this a second to process. Oh yeah, look, you can see the inbox number going down. Oh, and now I've got a system error. Look. Okay, it's still going. There were thousands of emails in my inbox before. Okay, it's dropping, it's dropping. There is still a bunch there. There's still a bunch there. So hold tight. Hold tight. There we go. So my inbox is now completely empty. You see starred emails. I've got more. If we look at my inbox, I've got less. But remember that filter was on and we got a warning around that. So I'm going to go back into settings because if I leave this filter on I will not have any possible. I will not get any emails because we just said that all emails that come into the inbox get automatically archived. So that's not what we're trying to do. So if you go into settings and you click in, you've got to see more settings, all the settings here and you look at filters and blocked addresses. Now that we've entered filters and blocked messages, I want to go back and find the filter that we just set up that said all emails that come into the inbox skip the inbox. That's what we just set up. I don't actually want that to happen because that's going to mean no emails ever go into my inbox and they're all just going to go to archives and that's going to create problems. So I'm going to delete that filter that we just set up so that when people start sending me emails again it will go back to the impacts. But that took less than five minutes to get us to inbox zero. And honestly the majority of this time was spent waiting for Gmail to catch up because we had so much in there. Easy breezy. And that's the power of using some productivity automations in your business. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Okay, remember, if you want the step by step on that as well, you can go to our blog post on this. And that's the same exact blog post I pull every time I go to Inbox Zero and barbecue.com the blog post on how to get to Inbox Zero in five minutes or less. Number two how to schedule meetings with ease within the Google Suite without going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth on scheduling or without using your typical booking calendar. Now I'll explain to you how I do this and why I sometimes use this built into Google functionality even though I do have a separate calendar booking system for clients to grab time with me, for colleagues to grab time with me. So check this out. I'll give you the scoop. But Google's got a built in feature so you can make scheduling super easy when you want to get some time with a colleague, with a friend, with a client, with a partner. To make this super simple, check this out booking link that I can send to people for them to hop on my calendar at any given time. For example, when people are interested in joining us inside of the modern CEO where we work with our clients to help them streamline their businesses and increase the results without sacrificing their life, their time or their profit, I can send over a booking link where people can select times to book. However, you may know from our earlier episode in this series that I also have blocks on my calendar for no working time and once a month I block an entire week for my monthly productivity block. You can see here on my screen this monthly productivity block is scheduled from now until eternity to begin on the last Sunday of the month and to go for one week. So in those weeks my calendar is quite clear. There's a lot more space however it is blocked so that people can't pop on my calendar and it allows me time to really have time for deep focused work without distractions and without things unexpectedly popping up. But sometimes I do have to schedule meetings during that time and my calendar is booked and I don't want to disrupt that stuff system where I can send people booking links and they can schedule time to meet with me any other time of the year. So in those cases what I do as an exception so I don't have to change my calendar booking process, but I may want to make an exception to my productivity week or have a coffee chat with someone or have a one off client meeting in that productivity week what I will do is I will go right here into Google. I mean look at this clean inbox. It's always a joy to come in here when things are clean and I will email send someone directly and what I will do instead of using a booking link that already has A system and blocks in place for it is I will come right into the email and I will click, I'll scroll right on over to this little calendar icon at the bottom of the window and I will select schedule time to meet. When I select schedule time to meet, I'm going to get two options. Create an event. But I want to go up here to offer times you're free. So I'm going to offer times I'm free and my calendar will immediately pull up times that am available. And I'm going to get to customize this a little bit. So find times you can meet and it'll automate all of this. But you also then have the option to select the times that you want to offer up and you can add multiple times throughout the day. You can see in the screen here I'm just clicking all the times that I want to show someone that I have availability for this potential meeting during a time when my calendar might otherwise be blocked. So then that availability is going to pop up. But then you'll see at the bottom here I clicked all those times on my calendar and now you're seeing that they added below as times that I have availability. And the options will be presented to the person that we'll be scheduling to meet with. And you can also add other dates and other times and then hit next. Then you're going to see all those times again, the event title, let's meet. You can edit that and schedule the purpose or input the purpose of the meeting. You'll see all the times you're available, you can edit again, you can add more. But then ultimately what you want to do is you want to add it to the email, saving, saving, so that when you go to meet with someone, pick a time that works and you will see all of these options right in the email. So then the person can select the time and it's going to go on their calendar. And any data that you put in about where to meet will also automatically be included. So this is a very quick get around when you want to do something that's not a part of your standard process, but you don't want to change your whole system and have that breakdown. Easy breezy. Let me know if you're going to try this. Now, if you have been following in our productivity series, you know that I have a certain number of hours a week that I set aside for work every week. Maybe that's 10 hours for you, maybe that's 20, maybe it's 40 for me. My goal is to have sit down focused at this desk. Generally speaking, sometimes I'll cowork somewhere or work at a coffee shop to change up the mood. But generally spend speaking. It is my intention to be working at the computer being productive for no more than 24 hours per week. But how do I track if I'm spending my time on the right things or if I'm allocating my time to things that are aligned with my goals and my vision and then how do I reflect on that? Listen, I don't spend a ton of time on this either. This tool makes this time tracking so super simple. Check out Google Time Insights. I'm going to show you my behind the scenes now feature that Google has that I like to use is something called Time Insights within the Calendar. So when you click on Time Insights here, this other section is going to pop up that details your time breakdown by color. So what you have the opportunity to do inside of Google Calendar is click on on an event that you have and assign it to a label within the calendar. So I've got marketing time, I've got personal time, I've got modern CEO and client time, I've got new projects. So with this in mind, what this allows me to do is sort of color code my week using these labels and then assess very quickly at the end of a week or at the beginning of the week, how much time do I have allocated where? So this is a great example where you can see I've got a bunch of time that I did not allocate. However, I know exactly what I did on Monday, so I'll take that into my weekend review and I know exactly what I did on Tuesday. Some of this personal time and this personal appointment I had scheduled went a little bit longer than eight into my work week. And then it helps you see based on the working hours that you have set up, what is the remaining time available? And of course you can adjust your designated working hours in here. So if you want to track and have a good understanding of where your time goes and you want to assess, why don't I have enough time for something? Or I was supposed to get those videos done this week and I didn't. Where did all the time go? This is going to help you do a quick assessment at the end of each week, but it'll also help you pre plan for the week and sort of see do I have enough time dedicated to the things I need to dedicate time to? And if not, you've got a quick opportunity to reset and readjust. Honestly, do I spend a lot of time on this? Absolutely not. It is just a data point and it informs and helps me understand where did all of my time go so that I can be super intentional with what I want to be doing now. Of course you can see I've got my monthly productivity block happening this week because the last Sunday of the month was the 23rd, so pulled right on through. So my week looks a little bit different than a usual week and you're seeing more space than I typically have in my given working week because my week was blocked well in advance. So that's an invitation and opportunity for you to create some space for yourself well in advance. So when you get to the last week of August this year, if you choose to have your productivity block at the end of each month like I do, you are gonna be thanking yourself for that extra space to roll into the fall, prepared and ready to go and getting some deep work done. So just an opportunity to check out where you're spending your time and make sure it's aligned with what you want to be accomplish the Time Insights right here on Google Calendar. Okay, let me know in the comments if you're going to try Google's Time Insights feature or if there's something else that you like better to track your time. I'm super curious. Strategy number four is going to be one you want to pay attention to. If you are so sick and tired of losing files, of not being sure of who you granted access access to what files within your Google Drive, and you want to know that if you ever need to change access to any of those Google tribes, let's say a team member leaves and you need to remove access to some files. You want to be able to do that with certainty and with ease without having to dig through and comb through a million bazillion files to see who has access to what and what you need to audit and what you need to update, we do not have to do this manually. In fact, if you structure your Google files differently, you're going to be able to remove one person's access to everything in the drive with a click of the button. And this is by using Google's Shared Drive feature. Check this out. Feature within Google that you may not be using in your business that will really benefit you is the shared drives. Have you ever someone has left your team or you've given access to files to someone like, oh, they don't really need access anymore. But how am I going to find all of those files that I gave someone access to? Google Shared Drive is The answer for this so what Google Shared Drive allows you to do is to manage access to folders files at a Drive level. So you can see I've got three drives here that different numbers of people have access to. And when you go to grant people access and you want to manage members, you give team members in your company access at the drive level so that if when someone potentially leaves your company, hopefully everybody, you've got high retention and everybody's sticking around for a good long while. But when they do find a new opportunity, you want to be able to update your access to files very quickly and not have to dig through tens of hundreds of thousands of files to update and remove access to people who no longer need access to those files. So you can add people right here at the top of the drive level and remove people as well. Now I'm going to take that out because this is just for an example, but something else I want to call out here is that you can also set Share Drives settings so that you can allow people outside of the organization that you have to access Share Drives or not. You can allow people who aren't Shared Drive members to access files or not, and from a team management perspective and to make sure folders don't start getting shared again and individual files. So you have to go on that hunt. I would definitely not allow people who are not Shared Drive members to access files. And then you can set other role permissions for who can copy and download and delete and move things around. So that's options too. But this is the one key button that I wanted to share with you right now to help you better control and better manage who has access to what files within your company. Let me know if this feature is a surprise to you and if you give this a try. Lastly, this is probably the simplest Google feature of aml, but I was so excited when I saw this was released maybe just a couple of months ago and it's making organizing my SOP inside of Google Docs a whole lot easier. Yes, we have tried everything to organize our SOPs and our operations playbook in our business. We kept going back to Google Docs for this and I'm going to show you a simple way to start to organize your Google Docs so you don't have a bunch of separate files to track and so that you don't have one doc that is just endless, endless, endless and hard to find anything in. You're definitely going to want to check out Google Tabs. See what I mean here? S of a productivity hack, but it's just going to help you keep your Google Docs more organized. And honestly, when things are more organized for me, I know my productivity goes up because I spend less time looking for things and hunting for things, and I can get to what I need faster. This is so dang simple. And it's a new feature inside of Google that's going to make your life a whole lot easier. So you can see here, I've got a new, new document that I created that. There we go. The Google wanted to help me, right? And I just wanted to write on my own, I've got this new document. And let's say that this document is going to be made up of various different parts. And let's say it's going to be an SOP binder or what we call a playbook. Do you remember when working in offices or brick and mortar, we had physical binders with SOPs documented in it? Wow. What I like about what you're about to see is we're going to make this feel a little bit more like a binder. So it's nice and organized versus having to go into different files and different documents. So maybe in this SOP binder playbook, you're going to have SOPs on your invoicing process and your contract renewal process and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. By the way, yes, we do document our processes inside of Google Drive. We tried so many different things, so many different tools, systems, project mini websites, et cetera. This just became the easiest thing for us to do. But those SOPs and how to design them is a conversation for another day. Now I want to think about what are those things that we want to put into this binder? And let's say that we're going to do invoicing and contract renewal and client onboarding. These are very random items, but the few things that just popped to mind, I'm at least going to reorder them. And then what is cool in this feature is that you can have different tabs. So if this is our SOP binder playbook, you can have different tabs that represent what the documents are. So I'm going to rename this. Actually, I want to call this our cover page, because the entire document here is going to be the SOP binder. So we've got our cover page here, but I want to add another document tab so that all of the things related to client onboarding can be in this space. So all the client onboarding steps will go here. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. And I know exactly where to go and I'm not getting confused by client invoicing or where other things are. Oh, let's pop back to our cover page real quick. What's next? Invoicing is the next section. Rename invoicing. And what is our third section? Contract renewals. Rename contract renewals back to my cover page. Now the other thing that you can do is that you can get the hyperlink for each one of these sections and you can link them to the tab in the binder, insert link, and pop that right in there. And then if people come into your document, they're like, cover page. This SOP binder covers all of these things. And let me go right to those things from here or let me go right to those things from the outline on the side here. That includes all of our documents tabs. And to get to that, in case you've never seen that before, it's just right over here on the left in this upper left hand corner. And you can just click to open that up and see all of the pages. And if you can, you add sub tabs or you turn these into headings. You will be able to see those headings detailed here in an outline for you as well. And I would highly recommend using that in your SOPs. Okay, that's it. Five simple AI productivity hacks, all within the Google Suite that you can use to make life just a little bit easier as you're moving through your day. Let me know which one of these tips was your favorite or let me know what we missed. What have I not used yet within the Google Suite that we need to know about as an AI productivity hat to just make our days a little bit easier and to speed things up a little bit more so you can get back to focusing on your business and on the things that really matter. Remember, you are right on time and I'll see you in our next episode. Thanks for being here.