425: 4 AI Tools I Use Every Single Day (And the Friction They Remove)

0:00I need to tell you something, and it's a little embarrassing. I have become obsessed with AI. And not obsessed in the way that people mean when they say that at a dinner party, kind of half joking and half worried that robots are coming for their jobs. I mean obsessed the way that I get about anything that I find that actually works. Things like time blocking or setting a desired outcome for a meeting. I find a tool, I use it a few times, and then I cannot imagine life without it. Hello and welcome to The Modern Manager. I am Amy Canberra-Stewart, and every week I share tips and strategies to help you close the gap between knowing what good management looks like and actually doing it.

0:40While you're here, go ahead and follow the show so that you never miss an episode. And if you like what you're hearing, please leave a rating or review so that other managers know it's worth giving the show a listen. Okay, so here's the thing about me and technology. I am one of those people who is always looking for the next greatest app. I just love how good software helps us do and be better. But AI, it's a different world. It is not just a more user-friendly interface or better features. It's a whole new way of working. So today, I want to walk you through four AI tools that I use every single day.

1:17Not because they're cool tools, but to show you the friction that they're removing that you might not have even realized existed for you. The tools I'm about to describe are not clever add-ons. They're actually sitting directly inside the tasks that eat most of the time in a manager's day. Things like writing, email, meetings, and the thing that you wish you had and you just haven't found. So here's the core idea I want you to leave with today. The AI tools that actually change how you work are the ones that remove those frictions so that you can focus on what matters most. Now, one quick caveat.

1:51Of course, I need to tell you that you should always check with your boss or your IT team before using any unimproved tools to ensure they comply with your company's security and privacy policies. Okay, now let me show you what it looks like in my actual day, tool by tool. The first one is Whisperflow. It is a dictation tool, but calling it a voice dictation tool really undersells it. I talk and it turns whatever I say into a clean, properly formatted text, whether that's a Slack message, an email, a bullet list buried in a two-page memo, or a conversation I'm having with Claude. And here's why this matters for managers specifically.

2:29Typing is a bottleneck, even for people who are good at it. The cool thing is that when you sign up, you can take a speed typing test, and it'll tell you how many hours a week you'll save if you talk instead of type. Mine was 16 hours, and I'm a pretty fast typer. And it's not just the speed of capturing and the time savings. Sometimes, at least for me, it's just easier to talk to get my thoughts out. And then when they're automatically formatted, it just feels like magic. The second tool is Shortwave, which is an AI email client. And what I love about Shortwave is the ability to customize or really train it to sort my email.

3:06So I'm going to give you a very concrete example. And I know it's specific to me, but I'm sure you can imagine how this would relate to you. I get a lot, and I mean a lot, of outreach from PR agents and folks wanting to be guests on the show. I have instructed Shortwave to first identify any emails that are an outreach, then assess them against my guest criteria, and then give me the list with its recommendation of who I should consider, who is clearly out, and who it couldn't make the call on because it was either on the border or it didn't have enough information. I still review every email inquiry myself, but it's just so much faster because they're already pre-sorted for me.

3:44I've set up about six sorting mechanisms, so emails that come from clients always get my attention, but so do emails that come from my kid's school that have an action item, not just the weekly newsletter. The AI is capable of recognizing when someone is asking me to do something versus it's just an FYI. And this solves one of my biggest email problems, triage. Email is overwhelming because every message requires you to first figure out how urgent is this and what does it need. And that decision making tax seriously slows you down. Shortwave does a first pass and then it can write the draft response, remind me when something hasn't been responded to, and so much more.

4:22It's just a much more civilized way to do email. The third tool is Granola. And this one has changed my meetings the most. It listens during calls and produces a transcript along with clean, organized notes afterwards without me typing a single word during the meeting. Now, what makes this unique and what I particularly love about Granola is a few things. First, it works for in-person meetings, not just virtual ones. If you have gotten used to having transcripts and notes generated from your Zoom or your team calls, I will tell you for myself, it was surprisingly frustrating to go back to in-person meetings and then have to go old school and take my own notes.

5:00Granola works on your phone and I actually used it in a meeting that was in a really loud room and there were six of us gathered in person. I simply started Granola on my app on my phone, placed it in the center of the table, and at the end it had captured our conversation and generated the notes within seconds. And I also love that it doesn't join the virtual meeting, so there's no extra Mamie's note taker participant. It only captures text, not video, so the data storage is significantly less because whoever goes back to the videos. Plus, you can create custom templates for how your notes should be organized, so your team meeting output is different from a one-on-one or a project planning meeting.

5:37The fourth is Replit, which when I told my husband I started vibe coding and now I want to build an app for everything, he just knew I had drunk the Kool-Aid and there was no going back. Replit is a tool that lets you build actual working software, apps, internal tools, trackers, basically anything you can imagine just by describing what you want in plain language and then connecting it to the tools you already use. Now, I am not a developer. In the early 2010s, I did try to learn HTML, but let's just say that coding was not my strong suit. But I have used Replit to build small tools for my own business and my life that used to require extensive manual activities or hiring someone else or just living without them and being aggravated all the time.

6:21Here's one small example. I use Notion to manage my tasks, but there isn't a great Notion workflow that allows me to capture a voice note on my phone and send it to a database with the correct due date, tag, project, and owner. So the way I did this before was to save voice notes to myself and then manually add them to Notion later. Not anymore. I asked Replit to create an app for me to do exactly that. And it was ridiculously easy. I built it in about an hour on a Saturday. And now I open the app, I start talking, and in just a few seconds, it is all in notion with the right properties. I've created five different apps so far on Replit, and there are about a hundred more that I cannot wait to create.

7:00But for you, think about how many times your team has said, I wish we had a simple way to do X, or wouldn't it be nice if we could just do Y, and whatever software or system that you're currently using, it just isn't capable. That is the gap that Replit closes, because now you can build an app to do pretty much anything. Now, what all four of these tools have in common is that they take the administrative layer, the typing, the sorting, the note-taking, the technical execution off my plate, and they hand me back time and attention. They made me a better manager because they gave me back the bandwidth to be more present and in the flow of my work, especially in the moments that really require it.

7:39So here's what I want you to do this week. Pick one of these four tools to try. I've linked to all of them in the show notes. So if you hate typing or you just prefer to talk and think out loud, try Whisperflow and talk out an email, a Slack message, or a memo, or even when you're just chatting back and forth with Claude. If you're someone who goes to a lot of meetings, both virtual and in person, try Granola for your next couple of meetings and see if it helps with your follow-through. Notice that you can use it on your phone in a phone call, in an in-person meeting, or on Zoom. If your inbox is where your day goes to die, try Shortwave.

8:12Spend about 30 minutes training it, and then over the course of the week, notice if email just becomes more manageable and things stop falling through the cracks. And if you've got a running list of small things you wish existed for yourself or for your team but never knew you could build, spend 20 minutes or so in a tool like Replit and describe the simplest version of what you're looking for and see what comes back. So pick whichever tool maps to your actual bottleneck, not just the one that sounds coolest, but you know, you can try the cool ones too. And if you do try one of these this week, I really want to hear about it.

8:44So send me a message and tell me what you tried and what it freed up. Now, I told you at the top that I have become obsessed with AI, and I hope you understand why and that I've sparked a little bit of an obsession in you too. Thanks again for joining me. Until next time.