The best way to stay productive, according to a new study?
A better way, according to us?
Have kids who create a productivity app that utilizes artificial intelligence to save you hundreds of hours of wasted time each year. This new app is called, unsurprisingly, Time. It was created by two teenagers, and it’s already the easiest way to get your work/life ratio back to an actual balance.
It’s just one of six A.I.-powered tools that’ll help you stay happily productive in 2017.
Time comes from Blue Cocoa, an app studio run by 17-year old Shaan Singh (and his 15-year-old friend Erik). It basically uses color-coded “waves” that act as a timer, so you can keep up with your schedule at a glance, working off the usual red/yellow/green system. When you finish a task, you pull down the wave.
It’s psychological: you see the red, you work harder. “You don’t need to even see the number (of minutes),” Singh notes. Except for adding tasks, every other aspect of the app involves dragging, swiping and tapping. The AI will “learn” your patterns and give out productivity suggestions for specific tasks, including different times of day to work on different projects.
And just to make you feel bad: when teenager Singh isn’t designing apps, he’s researching a way to diagnose autism with machine learning at the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins Medicine.
Want to be even more productive? Here are a few other new and new-ish A.I. powered bots/apps/devices to streamline your life:
Capsule: Tracks your movements, connects them to photos you’ve taken and delivers a weekly metrics digest of how you spend/waste your time (hours at home per week, average departure time, etc.).
Winds: Use an RSS (like Feedly or the late Google Reader) to digest your news? Winds personalizes your reading and tailors it to your interests and the content you engage with the most.
Vaultedge: Find all your important documents (bills, spreadsheets, etc.) stuck in the cloud or on your hard drive. The A.I. will categorize, tag and summarize them, and also provide a one-stop-shop search.
Bonjour: A voice-controlled A.I. alarm clock that learns your schedule, offers suggestions and adjusts on the fly for weather, traffic, etc.
X.ai: One of the first virtual assistants we ever used (and now updated to work with Outlook). Basically, the virtual “Amy” or “Andrew” takes care of all scheduling requests.
This article was featured in the InsideHook newsletter. Sign up now.
