Every workshop, the same moment: someone asks “okay but besides ChatGPT, what should I actually be using?” — and forty women lean in. So here's the answer we give in the room, written down. Five tools, all with free tiers, all boring-proof.
1. An AI meeting note-taker
If you take one thing from this post: stop writing minutes. Tools like Fathom or Otter sit in your calls, take the notes, pull out the action items and draft the follow-up email. The first time you finish a call and the summary is just there, you'll be evangelising to your group chat by dinner.
2. Canva's AI features
You probably already use Canva. You're probably ignoring the AI bits. Magic Write drafts your copy, background remover saves you a designer, and Magic Resize turns one graphic into every format your content calendar needs. It's the gateway AI — familiar house, new superpowers.
3. Claude
Our pick for anything long or nuanced: contracts you want explained, reports you need summarised, writing that should sound like you. Paste in a whole document and interrogate it. (Yes, we know, “none of them are ChatGPT” — Claude is the other one. It counts.)
4. A smart scheduler
Tools like Reclaim or Motion look at everything on your plate and play calendar Tetris for you — protecting focus time, shuffling the movable stuff, defending your school run like a bouncer. Set your rules once; stop negotiating with your own diary.
5. Perplexity
Research with receipts. Ask a question, get an answer with sources you can check — which matters when you're making a business decision, not writing a poem. It's the difference between “I read somewhere” and “here's the source”.
What to skip
Anything promising to “10x your productivity overnight”, anything you can't cancel in two clicks, and any tool you're adopting because a man on LinkedIn was shouting about it. Six good tools beat sixty shiny ones.
The win: pick one of the five and set it up this week. That's it. That's the whole homework.