Do More Newsletter

🌟 Editor's Note

After many requests, we are creating a newsletter to show some of the exciting new advancements to help you be more productive.

🚀 This Week’s AI Productivity App Highlights

The AI productivity landscape continues to evolve rapidly, and this week brings a fresh crop of apps making headlines in the past seven days. Here are the standout newcomers:

• Tori: An AI-powered productivity companion designed to help users overcome procrastination, block distractions, and build better habits through personalized coaching and gamified progress tracking.

• NotesDash: A digital sticky notes hub with AI features for organizing, prioritizing, and summarizing your notes, now available as a free app on iOS.

• Gigabrain: An AI tool focused on surfacing relevant Reddit reviews and discussions, integrating seamlessly with your workflow for smarter research.

🌟 Meet Tori—Your AI Productivity Sidekick

Tori is redefining what it means to have a personal productivity partner. Unlike traditional task managers or focus apps, Tori combines AI-driven planning, proactive coaching, and emotional support into a single, evolving digital companion.

What Sets Tori Apart?

• Personalized AI Partner: Choose and customize your own Tori to match your unique productivity needs and personal style.

• Smart Task Planning: Tori helps you plan and prioritize tasks, nudging you to get started and stay on track.

• Distraction Blocking: With built-in phone and web blockers, Tori keeps distractions at bay during focus sessions.

• Emotional Support: Need a boost? Tori offers encouragement and support, helping you push through tough moments.

• Gamified Progress: Earn XP, level up your Tori, and unlock new partners as you build consistency and achieve your goals.

• Group Accountability: Join focus sessions with friends for extra motivation and accountability.

Tori is built for anyone battling procrastination, ADHD, or the lure of endless digital distractions. The app’s proactive coaching and friendly interface make it a standout choice for anyone looking to “do more” with less stress.

Your Easily Confused Friend Who Knows Everything

Some people predict doom from AI. Others think it will change everything for the better. Still, others avoid it entirely, thinking it’s a passing fad. I think the majority of us, though, are just trying to figure out how we can use AI in a way that’s actually helpful.

And it is helpful. It’s like this little buddy you can chat to who knows nearly everything – read every book, read every article, and remembers it all. Not only that, he can read a long PDF for you and summarize it in seconds. He can competently write code and prose and poetry hundreds of times faster than you. That’s a useful guy to have around at your beck and call!

The problem is, he’s not quite right in the head.

First off, he has that problem from the guy from Memento who had an accident and can’t make any new memories after the date of the accident. The data of the accident for AI is its training data cutoff date. If AI doesn’t have access to a quick web search, most will incorrectly answer who the current president is.

However, this is at least a problem that can be easily factored in. And there are ways around it, similar to how the guy in Memento kept Polaroids with labels on them or tattooed important information on himself to keep up to date – not ideal solutions, but they work.

The bigger, much more unpredictable problem with your friend is that he can’t tell reality from his imagination. And thus we have hallucinations.

Hallucinations: When AI Makes Things Up

At its heart, AI is a pattern-matching algorithm. And the problem is that confidently stated, plausible, incorrect information matches the pattern of real information. This isn’t AI lying – it just has no real way to filter in its computer brains things that sound right from what is real – That’s why when it makes something up, we call it a “hallucination” because to the AI, it’s as real as anything else. It’s just putting words together based on the data it was trained on, and whatever sounds real to it is real.

In a way, it’s amazing that it’s actually correct most of the time. And AI researchers keep making it more and more accurate, including the thinking models that take more time to check their work.

But the problem is still there in every output, and there are consequence to not spot it, such as lawyers who were fined for citing made up sources in their brief. So AI is this friend who knows everything, but you have to double-check his work because can occasionally go insane (but not in a way easy to detect). Not quite as useful, now?

Many people will dismiss this weird friend of yours and say you should never talk to him, but anyone who has used AI knows this is foolish – despite its flaws, it can be great and save you lots of time. You just have to learn how to be accepting of what it is – flaws and all.

Tips for Using AI as a Helpful Tool (Despite Its Flaws)

So, how do you put your knowledgeable but confused friend to work? You just have to learn to manage the situation. Here are some tips for that:

• Be aware of the AI’s limits (and stay skeptical): Simply knowing that the AI might be wrong is step one. Don’t put blind faith in any single response. If AI says something surprising or important, pause and verify it. Treat the AI’s output as a helpful suggestion or draft – not final truth.

• Ask clear, specific questions and provide context: AI models are more likely to get confused if your prompt is vague or assumes facts it might not know. To get better results, frame your questions clearly. Include any relevant details or constraints in your prompt. The more precise you are, the less the AI has to guess (and potentially hallucinate). So, instead of saying, “Tell me about the battle of Hastings,” be more specific with, “Give me a two-paragraph overview of the Battle of Hastings (1066): who fought, who won, and one long-term effect on English law. Keep it at a 9th-grade reading level.”

• When needing up to date information, make sure it’s an AI with internet access: ChatGPT and many other models can now use the internet when coming up with answers (in fact, Perplexity specializes in this). This is essential when you’re looking for up-to-date information, as the training data on AI is often months behind.

• Double-check important facts through independent sources: This cannot be stressed enough – verify critical details outside the AI. If ChatGPT or Claude gives you a piece of information that you plan to act on (say, a medical dosage, a legal detail, or just a historical fact you’re going to publish), take a moment to cross-verify it. Do a quick web search or check a trusted reference book. One thing to avoid is simply asking the same AI to fact-check itself (“Are you sure about that?” or “Can you give sources for that answer?”). Oftentimes, if it hallucinated once, it will just hallucinate supporting details or phony references on the follow-up.

• Prompt the AI to ask relevant questions before starting. This is something automatically done by ChatGPT’s Deep Research but works for other AIs. By telling the AI to ask follow up questions, it can ask you for the information it needs to fill it its understanding instead of just making this up itself.

• Tell the AI it’s okay to say “I don’t know”: A big flaw of AI is that it’s not good at expressing uncertainty. Many hallucinations are because it thinks it needs to come up with an answer even when there isn’t one. You can mitigate this by prompting the AI to admit uncertainty when applicable. For instance, you can say in your prompt, “If you aren’t sure of an answer, it’s fine to say you don’t know.” This explicit instruction sometimes prevents the model from filling the void with a hallucinated answer.

A Powerful Assistant – Even If It Needs Help

By following these practices, you can greatly reduce the chance of being led astray by your well-meaning but sometimes confused friend. It wants to help, but it’s often up to you to lead it down paths where it is less likely to get confused.

And it might not always be like this. Every day, AI is improving, and if you get used to working with it in its flawed state, you’ll be better positioned to reap the benefits as it improves. AI may not yet be ready to take over the world, but it can take over a lot of tasks for you and save you time.

With supervision.

🤝 Partner Spotlight: Duet Display

Duet Display transforms your tablet or smartphone into a high-performance wireless second display for your Mac or PC. Perfect for multitaskers, remote workers, and creative professionals, Duet Display offers:

• Seamless connectivity: Effortlessly extend your workspace.

• Touch and Apple Pencil support: Ideal for designers and note-takers.

• Industry-leading performance: Lag-free, high-resolution display.

Discover how Duet Display can supercharge your productivity at the Duet Display website.

Stay productive. Stay ahead. See you next week in the Do More Newsletter!

Have Topics You Want to Learn About? Email us and we will try to include them in the next update.