5 AI Tools That Save Me 10+ Hours a Week
If your calendar and inbox always win, you do not need another productivity hack. You need a small stack of AI tools that quietly removes hours of typing, note-taking, and busywork every week.
Some links on this page are my personal referral links. When you use them, you get the perks listed here, and I may receive a benefit too. If that works for you, thank you for supporting the channel.
Where to sign up with perks
- Granola — two free months of Granola Business (referral link)
- Wispr Flow — one free month of Wispr Flow Pro (referral link)
More AI tools I use (including Cora) live on my Links page under AI.
These are the five I actually run: Claude, Granola, Wispr Flow, Relay, and Cursor. Everything here has a way to start for free. None of them asks a bot to join your Zoom.
Why this stack is worth stealing
Each tool does one job really well. Together they cover the full loop from raw conversation to written output to repeat workflows and code. I am not trying to squeeze more hours out of the day. I am trying to spend fewer of them on low-leverage tasks.
Key insight: The win is not "more AI." It is picking tools that remove a whole category of work (typing, summarizing, transcribing) so you stay in flow on the work only you can do.
The five apps
Claude
This is the hub. I use Claude for almost everything: drafting, decision support, skills, and project context so sessions pick up where I left off. Skills and project files mean I am not re-explaining my business every time I open a chat. If you only adopt one tool from this list, make it this one.
Cowork: recents, pinned work, and sessions so Claude stays oriented to what you are building.
Granola
Granola is my AI meeting notes app. It runs in the background, so there is no third-party bot on the call. It records a transcript of the conversation, I can jot notes or not, and when the call ends I get cleaned-up notes I can share or paste into Claude. That single handoff saves me from re-listening to recordings. Signing up through my Granola link currently includes two free months of Granola Business.
Granola tied to your calendar: what is coming up before you even join the call.
Wispr Flow
We think and speak faster than we type. Wispr Flow turns speech into text wherever I am typing on my computer: Slack, email, or even the Claude prompt box. It keeps momentum when a paragraph would slow me down. Through my Wispr Flow link you can get one free month of Pro.
Insights: where dictation actually shows up (for me, a lot of it is AI prompts).
Relay
Relay is "Zapier, but built for AI workflows." I use it when the steps are mostly deterministic and I only need a small AI step in the middle. Example: on a schedule, turn my weekly LinkedIn posts into draft blog posts on my site. Scheduled runs mean I am not manually copying content on Sunday nights.
A real Relay: Monday schedule, pull posts, GPT pass, drop into Notion, email me when it is done.
Cursor
For real coding, I use Cursor instead of burning Claude tokens on long agent runs. Cursor is built for editing a codebase with AI inline. The nice part is that context files and skills I set up for Claude map cleanly into how I work in Cursor, so the same habits transfer.
Meta but honest: me drafting this exact guide in Cursor with the repo and chat in one place.
For referral links and perks in one place (Granola, Wispr Flow, Cora, and more), head to my Links page.
Additional Reading
Here are some related guides to check out: