10 Game-Changing Personal Automations to Supercharge Your Productivity

Hey there, my name is Andy O'Neill. My company is WebLitica LLC, and I wanted to show you some game-changing personal automations you can use to supercharge your personal productivity. This is, these are kind of automations that help you get more things done, that help you write better, look better, do more things, that kind of thing.

And we're going to talk about boosting your productivity with a platform called Make. Make is an automation tool. If you're familiar with Zapier, Make is a direct competitor of Zapier. And I have been using Make since 2017. Back then it was called IntegraMAT. It's undergone a brand change since then. But what Make can do is, even a simple automation can help you get more done on a daily basis. So I'm going to talk a little bit more about Make. Again, Make is used to automate your work. It's a drag and drop tool that can help you automate simple or complex workflows or processes. It can connect your apps. It connects natively to over a thousand popular apps and services. But with its tools, it can really connect to anything with an API or that has an integration connection. You're designed with Make using a visual interface, so it's a drag and drop interface. And you can scale your automations easily because you can start with a free plan and then just grow your plan. Their first plan is under $11 US. And so you can just grow your plan as you need more automations.

So I'm going to go through ten automation or productivity ideas. Not everyone is an automation and just give you kind of an idea how Make is used in this and how you can use this in your personal productivity. So this first one is a daily briefing bot. The idea here is your morning routine is a scavenger hunt of the latest blogs, the latest news, what's the weather. Right now, where we are in time is there's a lot of information being created every single day. And it's my opinion that our brains were not meant to handle everything that's happening. All of the updates. All of the news. It's just too much. So this is a daily briefing bot.

I've called it my Jarvis, if you're familiar with Marvel's Iron Man. And what it does is it summarizes a LinkedIn RSS feed. And then it also gets the weather and it puts all of this into an audio file that's spoken to me and sent to my Slack every day. So I'm going to go over here and play my AI personal assistant. This is a few days back, but we're going to play this and I'm going to give you an idea of what this sounds like and how this could possibly work for you.

Good day, Andy. Today is Tuesday, October 15th, and is the 289th day of 2024. Today's weather forecast indicates a high temperature of 58 degrees. The wind is blowing at 16 miles per hour from the northeast, with gusts reaching up to 30 miles per hour. Scattered clouds are expected throughout the day. Tomorrow's weather forecast will continue with similar conditions, featuring a high temperature of 58 degrees. Winds will remain consistent at 16 miles per hour from the northeast, with gusts up to 30 miles per hour and scattered clouds. Wednesday's weather forecast indicates a low temperature of 38 degrees and a high temperature of 63 degrees. Winds will be blowing from the south-southwest at approximately 8 miles per hour, with gusts reaching up to 17 miles per hour. The sky will remain clear throughout the day. Here are the latest blog posts from Zapier. Number one, the five best blog sites for building a successful blog in 2025. Blogging remains vital in the digital landscape, allowing content control and audience access. Discover the top five blogging platforms. WordPress.org, WordPress.com, Ghost, Wix, and Blogger, each offering unique features and pricing. Number two, why relying on AI content detectors is a bad idea. And what you should do instead, AI content detectors are emerging alongside AI content generators, revealing their limitations. Experiments show these detectors often misidentify human-written text as AI generated, emphasizing the need for improved content quality over achieving a human score. Number three, how to automatically generate email summaries with Zapier and ChatGPT, streamline your email management with Zapier's ChatGPT integration. Summarize emails automatically in Slack or receive daily digests to stay organized and never miss important messages again. Optimize your workflow today. Have a great day, Andy, and make an eternal difference in someone's life. So that's the example of the AI assistant that I built for myself. These are highly customizable. They're things that you can use to summarize your day.

So as you're drinking your coffee or you're on the train or you're on your commute, you can hit play and you can get an update. This could very easily be a news source, so it uses an RSS feed to do this. And you can, you know, almost anything has an RSS feed or with some work you can, not a lot of work, you can turn it into an RSS feed.

So automation number two is my LinkedIn connection accelerator. So if you're on LinkedIn, you know that it takes a lot of work to connect. All the gurus are saying when you connect with someone, you need to write a personal invitation or a personal note. Well, who has time for that? Really? You have to go look at their profile, see if they went to the same school as you, find something you have in common or that you can point out. So what I do is I actually created this workflow and it works when I'm sitting around waiting. I spend a lot of time waiting on my kids at the gym to pick them up from ballet or dance. And so this is something I can do in some free time where I'm just sitting around where I, where I would normally be just scrolling through YouTube shorts or something. I do this instead. So what I do, the first thing I do is I find a profile of someone on LinkedIn that I would like to connect with. Then I take a screenshot of that on my phone and then I upload that to a custom chat GPT. And so this is a GPT that I have created that is knows it's supposed to write notes and it also knows that it's only supposed to return the, the text and the note and nothing else. So it's not going to say, here's your note, Andy. You know, it's just going to give me the note. So I uploaded this, it read the text off the image. Then it generated this note and I simply copy that and I paste it into the personalization and now I have this note that is custom and personalized to the person I'm trying to connect with and these take about a minute a piece. So maybe, maybe 90 seconds. So, you know, a 30, 30 minute or hour long time of me sitting, I can do a lot of connection requests and you know, I get, I get some great feedback from these as well.

So the next one is an AI enhanced meeting notes. So the problem here is that we're trying to solve is meeting notes. You know, I have most days I have back to back calls and it's hard to keep up with the notes and the tasks that come from that. So this is an automation that I've built and it watches for my notes and it actually grabs them, it does some formatting, it determines right here the math, it determines how long the meeting was and it adds it to my Evernote and then it also sends an email to whoever else was on the call, usually my clients, it'll send them an email from my email address that says, Hey, here's the notes from our call. And I get really great feedback from that. And it's just an automated process. Tom even had a lady reply and said, how did you take all these notes? We were talking the whole time. And so I had to fess up to her and say, yeah, you know, this is an automated AI thing. So but this is a great way to turn zoom meetings and to organize sharable notes with very little effort. And so I actually have automations that go a step further, but actually turn these into articles on my website. So I genericize the information, make it generic, and then take the ideas that are discussed and turn them into blog posts. So there's actually ways of taking this content and doing more with it.

So this is number four, my voice to Evernote second brain. A couple years ago I started using Evernote as my second brain. You'll notice here I'm sending my notes to Evernote. Here is another automation that I use that I can actually run from my phone. The challenge here is brilliant ideas always strike at the worst times. You're not at your computer, you don't have your planner, don't have your laptop or whatever. And you get this brilliant idea. So what I've done is I've created an automation where I use an audio recording app on my phone. I just open it up and I hit record and I start talking. And then what happens next is this automation runs. So the recording syncs over to my Dropbox and then I use ChatGPT to write that information and then I save it to my second brain, Evernote. So this is an automation that's just really great to let me capture information. I don't have to type. I've actually got arthritis in my thumbs, so typing on a phone is not something I enjoy. I can just speak into the phone and it will turn that into a note.

Number five, email to Monday Tasks. For those of you who have hundreds or thousands of emails in your inbox, I need to tell you something. Your inbox is not a task list. It may feel like one, but it's not. So what I built a year or two ago actually, it's been a little while, is an automation that watches my emails. And so in my inbox, I use Gmail, Google Workspace mail.

In my inbox, I get an email that should be a task. I drag it to a label. So I give it a label that says Monday Tasks. And then this automation watches my mail, and when it sees a new piece of mail that's been labeled, it will grab it and it will create it as a task in Monday. Not only that, if I get a reply to that email that's been labeled, it will actually grab that reply and add it as an update in Monday as well. So this is super helpful and gets a lot of emails out of my inbox and onto my Monday task list.

Automation number six, content curation for LinkedIn. Maintaining an active LinkedIn presence can feel like a second job. So this is an automation that I, this is one of the first ones I built. I have ones now that are more sophisticated and larger, but this one still works. I watch an RSS feed, then I take the content from that RSS feed and I generate a post, and then I push that into Buffer. Buffer is a scheduling app that I use for LinkedIn. I tell it what times and what days I want it to schedule, and it will handle that. Taking an RSS feed, I'm using AI, ChatGPT in this case, to rewrite the blog post into something I can share on LinkedIn.

Automation number seven I call Unsubby Digest, and what this is, is a, you know I've been using the same email for the 12 years I've been freelancing. So what happens is I'm on a lot of lists, a lot of email lists, and it's just hard to manage them all. This automation here will watch my mail and it will give me a summary of all the newsletters I've received in a 12-hour period. This runs at 4 p.m. every day, so I have time to look at it before the day is over, and here's an example, this is a small snippet, but it gives me who the sender is, and if it finds, if the automation finds an unsubscribed link in the email, it puts it in my summary email.

So here's what I do, I just scroll down that email, is there anything interesting here? Oh, this is interesting, and I can click and I can open that.

Every day, so I have time to look at it before the day is over, and here's an example, this is a small snippet, but it gives me who the sender is, and if it finds, if the automation finds an unsubscribed link in the email, it puts it in my summary email.

I have all of these emails, you know, 20, 30, 50, 60, 80, 100, in a 24-hour period. I get this one email that summarizes them for me. So here's what I do, I just scroll down that email, is there anything interesting here? Oh, this is interesting, and I can click and I can open that. I can see all the newsletters I've received without having to go to every individual one. And then when I find one that I'm like, you know what, I don't want this anymore. The automation attempts to get the unsubscribed link from that email, and if it does, it puts it in this email, and I can click right there in my summary email without having to go to every email and unsubscribe. This is a huge, huge, huge time-saver, and I love this, and probably four days out of five, I actually go through the list and summarize it.

Sometimes I archive it because I'm too busy, just because I know that if I need something, I can go back and review that.

Automation number eight, faceless video creation, can save a lot of time when trying to create content for a faceless YouTube channel such as Shorts. Using an RSS feed, in this case, the AppSumo RSS feed, videos can be automatically generated based on products from AppSumo. These videos, created using an AI platform called Placid, include background videos and audio voiceovers. It's a 100% automated process. Here's an example video promoting TapFlow from AppSumo.

Automation number nine, quick capture to second brain, is useful for capturing software recommendations during calls. By typing a slack message into a dedicated slack channel, the recommendation can be easily saved. Slack is a convenient form input because it is always open and easily accessible.

Imagine automatically generating a ranked list of high quality candidates tailored specifically to your needs. With TapFlow, you can analyze key skills and qualifications required for the role, making it easier to pinpoint the best fit candidates. The AI scrapes LinkedIn profiles, scoring and ranking them based on their relevance. And the best part, you get access to candidate contact information, allowing you to reach out instantly.

Just give you an idea of a 100% automated video that you could, this could be posted on TikTok or YouTube to promote TapFlow from AppSumo. And just a really cool thing to do. So you can just create these automated, you can have an automated video factory that turns blog posts into social ready videos. And again, the RSS feed, I talked about this earlier, AppSumo does not have an RSS feed, probably on purpose, but there's an app called RSS.app that you can use to turn a website into an RSS feed. And so that's what I'm using at the beginning here to get the, to turn the website into an RSS feed and watch for new content. Because they're publishing new content and apps all the time.

Number nine, quick capture to second brain. So I am often in calls and I hear a software recommendation. And before I had this, I would say, Ooh, I should remember that. And then I didn't remember that because, you know, who's, who's going to remember that? I created this little automation here and the way it works is I type a slack message into one of my slack channels. I have a dedicated slack channel for this. And I, I type it in and I'm about this slack channel. This is actually a free one that I created that I'm the only user on it and I have channels for this. So this, I called it web litica tools. And so this is, this is tools I build and I often use slack as a, a form input because I always have it open. It's literally right over here and I'm in about eight or nine different slack channels. So including this one. So I just go over here and I type gamma app AI slide deck and that's actually what I use to create these slides. It's a really cool app. I'd never used it before this. And so I type that in and I hit enter. And the idea here is I hear an app. I'm on a call, I'm watching a video and somebody says, Hey, have you heard of XYZ? Blah, blah, blah. It's really great. You can type that in there and hit submit and this will do the research for you. And this last step here is adding it to Evernote. So it's just a really handy way and here's an example. This is, this is just a few lines of the output it gave us. I, Perplexity is the AI agent I'm using here and it just did a really great job of researching it. Perplexity has the ability to go out to the web and get information live on the web. And so it did a really great job of researching it and this, this document in my Evernote is fairly lengthy of the information it has. So it takes a select message, researches it and adds it to a second brain. Again, this is a, this is a, an example of a personal workflow that if you wanted this done without doing it yourself, you would need an assistant or a VA to pass this off to. Hey, I need you to go research this thing. And the reality is that that probably wouldn't have happened. You're probably not going to get a VA just for that.

If you have a VA, this was something they could do. A VA might spend an hour, hour and a half researching what this is, and this automation can run in a few seconds in less than a minute. So it's just one of those things that allows you to do more with what you have without, you know, higher hiring that VA or without giving your existing VA this task to do.

Number 10, this is the most complex and I left it for the end. This is an AI tool that generates SEO optimized blog posts for me, my, my AI generated SEO blog posts. And I know there's a lot of controversy about should we use AI for blog posts or whatever. I'm, I'm writing these in such a way that there is a great deal of research behind them. And then there's a little bit of rewriting and tweaking in there. But basically the, the core of what this does is I will create a list of keywords in a database and then I will go through those keywords one by one and decide which ones I want to create a SEO article for. And so when I select one, what happens is, is I'm using this make scenario is actually doing a Google search on that keyword. It's returning the top 10 Google pages for that keyword. Using the information from those pages to write the post, the, the perplexity is right, it's happening right up here actually. This is the Google search. This is breaking out the 10 different pages and then perplexity right here is saying what information is on each of these pages that goes along with our keyword. And then we're saving that research and then eventually when we choose to write the blog post, it will use that accumulated research to write the posts.

I've had really great success with this. I'm generating, you know, a few hundred new posts per month. This is not 100% automated. I'm not, I'm not just posting things to the, to my website site unseen or this is actually going on a client's website as well. I'm actually putting eyes on it, making sure it's optimized correctly, but I can, I can publish one of these in about 30 seconds. So this does all of the work for a post except for the final 30 seconds. Sometimes it might take a couple minutes if there, if it's not close to being optimized. But between 30 seconds and a couple minutes to post each blog post is a significant savings over doing this from scratch. Again, you'd have to get a writer involved. I think the going rate is about $200 per SEO article right now. And so there's, there's a big difference between using this kind of automation to get you most of the way there and then finishing it up manually.

So that's my 10 productivity automations or hacks. And each of these are actually available on my YouTube channel. It's called, it starts with my name, Andy O'Neil on YouTube. And then I have some other resources I want to share with you.

If you are not started with make, you can scan this QR code to get an account. This is an affiliate link. This will get you the free month of the core plan, which is the starter plan for make. If you start with the free plan, what happens is you only get 1000 tasks in your free plan. And as you're building and learning and things, you're going to run through those tasks very quickly. So this will give you the first level of the plan for free, so you can get started and you do a lot of testing.

Next is the make academy. This is something offered by make. It's a free training you can take to learn the basics of make. If you're getting started with make, I would highly recommend doing this training. It's going to be a very broad training. It's not specific to the tools you use, but it's a great starting place. I've worked with a lot of new people to make and they get done and they're like, I'm so glad I did the make academy.

And next here is the co-build collective. It is my online community where I teach how to use make.com and how to automate with make. It is a business automation coaching community and you can scan this QR code to get access to that or go to weblitica.com community. And then the last thing I do is, and this is a little bit different than most providers, is I do one-on-one help. I get on a call, get on a Zoom call kind of like this where you're on the other side and we pull up your make automations and we work on them together. I teach you make along the way and we build these automations out. So you can scan this QR code or go to weblitica.com to book a call with me. And that's really how my model has shifted. I used to do big agency style projects and now I am investing into people teaching them how to use make. And so that's how you can get a call. I very much appreciate the opportunity to present at this conference and look forward to seeing what other speakers are talking about and I would love for any of you to reach out to me if you just want to chat or if you'd like some help with make automation. Thank you.