I almost gave up on scheduling. Seriously. Back in the early days of MovieLaLa, I was buried in so many meetings that my calendar looked like a game of Tetris gone wrong. I remember one particularly painful week where I double-booked a meeting with an investor I’d been chasing for months with a final-round interview for a lead engineer we desperately needed. It was a classic founder screw-up. I tried to be in two places at once, ended up looking like a fool to both, and landed neither. That one stung. It was a mess, and it was all my fault.
Everyone tells you to be more disciplined, to use this new app, to follow that new system. I tried them all. Nothing stuck. It felt like I was spending more time managing my productivity system than actually being productive. Then, a mentor, a guy who’d seen a few more battles than I had, showed me a completely backward approach. It felt wrong. It felt like cheating. But after I leaned into it, my productivity shot up by 262%. No, that’s not a typo.
Stop listening to the gurus. The secret to insane productivity isn't another complex system; it's about letting AI do the heavy lifting in a way nobody talks about.
1. Your Calendar Is Not Your Job
My first big realization was that I was spending hours a week just managing my calendar. Back and forth emails, finding time zones, rescheduling. It’s a time suck. The counterintuitive lesson? Stop doing it. All of it. It felt like jumping off a cliff, but I delegated 100% of my scheduling to an AI assistant. This isn’t just about a shared calendar link. This is an AI that has my priorities, knows I hate morning meetings, and understands which investors get a faster response. It negotiates times, sends the invites, and even pesters people for me when they don’t respond. I haven’t manually scheduled a meeting in over a year. The amount of mental space this freed up is impossible to overstate. It’s glorious.
2. AI Meeting Notes Are a Trap
This is where most people go wrong. They get excited about AI and start using it to transcribe their meetings. That’s a rookie mistake. A transcript is just more data to sift through. It’s a record, not a result. The real value of AI in meetings isn't what was said, but what needs to be done. Which brings me to my next point.
3. Hunt for Action Items, Not Keywords
The magic of AI isn't transcription; it's extraction. My AI doesn’t just record meetings. It actively listens for commitments. It’s trained to know the difference between a vague platitude like “I’ll look into that” and a concrete promise like “I will send the final report by Friday at 5 PM.” Within five minutes of a call ending, a summary of action items, with names and deadlines assigned, is in everyone’s inbox. It’s created a culture of accountability on my teams that I could never enforce manually. No more “So, what are the next steps?” emails that everyone ignores.
4. Give Your AI a Personality
This might sound crazy, but I’ve found that giving my AI assistant a name and a persona makes it much more effective. Mine is named ‘Alfred’. When I interact with it, I treat it like a real assistant. This forces me to be clearer in my instructions and helps me delegate more effectively. It’s a psychological trick, but it works.
5. Stop Checking Your Email
I used to live in my inbox. It was the first thing I checked in the morning and the last thing at night. Now, it’s just a data source for my AI. I have a custom script that’s ruthless. It sorts, prioritizes, and summarizes. It knows which investor emails are actually important and which are just newsletters. I get a single daily digest with three sections: ‘Urgent - Reply Today,’ ‘FYI - Read When You Can,’ and ‘Noise - Already Archived.’ I spend maybe 20 minutes a day on email now, down from what felt like a lifetime.
6. The Best AI Tools Are the Ones You Build Yourself
I have a background in engineering, so this one comes naturally to me. But even if you’re not a coder, you can still build your own simple AI tools. Services like Zapier and IFTTT let you connect different apps and create automated workflows. Start small. Automate one repetitive task. Then another. You’ll be surprised how quickly it adds up.
7. Use AI to Hire, Not Just Filter
Most companies use AI in hiring to filter out resumes. That’s a defensive move. I use it offensively. I have an AI that actively scours the web for interesting candidates who aren’t actively looking for a job. It looks for people who are contributing to open-source projects, speaking at conferences, or writing insightful blog posts. It’s like having a team of recruiters working for you 24/7.
8. Manage Your Investors with AI
Investor updates used to be a huge time sink. Now, I have a system that automatically pulls data from our internal dashboards and generates a draft of my monthly update. I still review and personalize it, but it saves me hours of work. It also ensures I never miss a beat and keep my investors in the loop.
9. The 262% Productivity Boost: A Breakdown
So, where does that 262% number come from? I’m a data guy, and if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. I tracked my time for a month before and a month after implementing this system. Here’s the breakdown:
- 40% less time in meetings: My AI assistant is ruthless about declining meetings without a clear agenda or purpose.
- 80% reduction in follow-up emails: Action items are captured and assigned automatically.
- 50% faster project completion: Clear action items and deadlines mean less ambiguity and faster execution.
- 92% less time on scheduling and email: This was the big one. The time I got back from automating these tasks was massive.
10. Building Your Own AI Workflow: A 3-Step Guide
Ready to get started? Here’s a simple 3-step guide:
- Identify Your Bottlenecks: For one week, track your time religiously. Where are you spending the most time on low-value tasks? Is it email? Scheduling? Meetings?
- Find a Tool (or Build One): Once you’ve identified your bottleneck, find an AI tool that can help. There are hundreds of them out there. If you can’t find one, think about how you could build a simple workflow with Zapier or a similar tool.
- Start Small and Iterate: Don’t try to automate everything at once. Pick one task and automate it. Then, once that’s working smoothly, move on to the next one. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.
11. The Future is About Smarter Workflows, Not More Tools
The market is flooded with AI tools. It’s easy to get caught up in the hype and end up with a dozen different apps that don’t talk to each other. The real win is not in having the most tools, but in having the smartest workflows. It’s about creating a cohesive system where AI works for you, not the other way around.
12. My Personal AI Stack
People always ask me what tools I use. Here are a few of my favorites:
- Scheduling: Custom-built, but you can get similar results with a tool like Calendly’s AI features.
- Meeting Notes: Fireflies.ai, with a custom script to extract action items.
- Email: Superhuman, with a lot of custom filters and rules.
- Workflow Automation: Zapier and my own custom scripts.
13. A Challenge to You
I want you to try something. Pick one repetitive task that you do every day. Just one. And for the next week, find a way to automate it with AI. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Just get it done. I promise you, it will change the way you think about work.
14. The Biggest Lesson of All
For all the talk about AI taking over the world, I’ve found the opposite to be true. By letting AI handle the robotic parts of my job, I have more time and energy for the human parts: creativity, strategy, and building relationships. AI is not a replacement for human ingenuity. It’s a force multiplier. And that’s the most counterintuitive lesson of all.
15. The Psychology of Letting Go
This is the part that no one talks about. The hardest part of this whole process wasn’t the technology. It was the psychology. As a founder, you’re wired to control everything. Letting go, truly letting go, of tasks you’ve always done is terrifying. My first week with ‘Alfred’ handling my calendar, I secretly checked behind it constantly. I was sure it was going to book me into some ridiculous, career-ending meeting. It never did. It took a conscious effort to trust the system. To trust the AI. But once I did, it was liberating. You have to be willing to fire yourself from the jobs that an AI can do better. It’s an ego blow, but it’s the only way to scale yourself.
My Challenge to You, Revisited
So I’m serious. I want you to pick one thing. Just one. Is it the 15 minutes you spend every morning sorting through newsletters? Is it the back-and-forth of trying to schedule a single call? Find that one thing, and spend an hour this week finding an AI tool to kill it. Don’t just try the tool. Commit to it for a week. Force yourself to use it. See what happens. The goal isn’t just to save a few minutes. It’s to fundamentally change your relationship with work. To go from being a doer of all things to a designer of systems. That’s the real unlock. That’s how you get your time back. That’s how you start working on the things that actually matter.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I know which items apply to my situation?
Start by honestly assessing where your biggest bottleneck is right now. The items that address that specific constraint will give you the highest return on your time and energy.
Which item on this list has the highest impact?
It depends on your stage and context, but in my experience, the items near the top of the list tend to have the broadest applicability. That said, sometimes the less obvious items create the biggest breakthroughs for specific situations.
Are these recommendations still relevant in 2026?
Absolutely. While specific tools and tactics change, the underlying principles remain consistent. I update my thinking regularly based on what I'm seeing in the market and across my portfolio companies.
Can I implement all of these at once?
I'd strongly recommend against it. Pick the 2-3 items that resonate most with your current situation and focus there. Trying to do everything simultaneously is a recipe for doing nothing well.