The PM’s Shortcut: Tools That Actually Eliminate Busywork
AI Meeting Notes: AI tools like Fathom and Read AI enhance focus during meetings by automating note-taking tasks.
Efficient Scheduling: Event scheduling tools like WhenAvailable streamline the booking process, minimizing time spent on email exchanges.
SOP Creation: Using Loom, team members can verbally document procedures, making SOP creation simpler and more efficient.
Data Recovery: Glean simplifies data retrieval for project initiation by providing quick access to required information.
Client Knowledge Base: Notebook LLM centralizes client information, enabling faster access to important details and reducing search time.
Project managers are no strangers to the grind of administrative work — the hours spent taking notes, chasing scheduling confirmations, manually building task lists, and hunting through systems for information that should be a click away. The actual work of managing a project — strategy, communication, problem-solving — often gets buried under a mountain of low-value, high-volume tasks.
But a growing number of PMs find that the right project management tools, including some unexpected ones, significantly cut that burden. Here's what they're actually using.
AI Meeting Notes: Staying Present Without Losing the Details
One of the most persistent sources of busywork for project managers is the meeting itself — or more precisely, everything that has to happen during and after it. Capturing notes, tracking action items, and producing a recap that's actually useful takes real time and cognitive load. AI-powered meeting tools have started to change that equation in a meaningful way.
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Megan Cotterman, Fractional Project Manager and Operations Consultant, has made Fathom a regular part of her workflow for exactly this reason. "One of my favorite tools is Fathom," she says. "For AI meeting note generation, just the ability to be present in a meeting and not be worrying about ferociously taking notes, combined with the AI feature where you can ask it questions afterwards, was a game-changer for me in the past year, for sure." The ability to stay fully present in a conversation — rather than splitting attention between listening and typing — is a shift that compounds across every meeting on a PM's calendar.
One of my favorite tools is Fathom for AI meeting note generation.
Ryan Gilbreath, Technical Project Manager at RTS Labs, relies on Read AI for the same reason, but with the added pressure of managing a high volume of concurrent work. "Read AI, my AI note taker," he says, "it has really become my second brain. It is like my personal PM assistant to help me document next steps and meeting highlights." Gilbreath juggles anywhere between nine to ten projects at a time, and describes the tool as the thing that helps him keep up with everything.
Scheduling Without the Back-and-Forth
Scheduling — especially for staffing, contracting, or coordinating across a large group — is one of those tasks that looks simple but quietly consumes enormous amounts of time. The back-and-forth emails, the missed replies, the availability conflicts: it all adds up. Alexandria O'Bannon, Staffing Manager at JUMP! Foundation found a solution outside the traditional PM tech stack in an event scheduling tool called WhenAvailable.
"A new tool that I've been using is not a PM tool, but I've made it a PM tool," O'Bannon explains. "WhenAvailable is basically an RSVP calendar tool – it reduces the back-and-forth in emails. I send one email, the people I'm booking with check it, and then I get a list of available dates that work for everyone. That cuts down two days of emails." It's a reminder that reducing busywork doesn't always require a purpose-built PM solution — sometimes a simple, well-applied tool does the job better.
A new tool that I’ve been using is not a project management tool, but I’ve made it into one. It’s called WhenAvailable.
Building SOPs Without the Manual Typing
Standard operating procedures are valuable, but getting a team to create them is another story. The documentation process feels heavy, and asking people to write up their processes while doing their jobs is a reliable way to get pushback. Derek Fredrickson, Founder & CEO of The COO Solution, found a way around that resistance entirely.
"When I introduce the idea of SOPs to team members or clients, to them it feels like I want them to document what they're doing while they're doing it, which seems difficult," Fredrickson says. "So instead, I said, why don't you use a tool like Loom and just talk through how you're doing what you're doing. Then, they can get the transcript from Loom. You put that into AI and it will generate an SOP, as opposed to typing in the entire SOP from scratch." The result is documentation that actually gets created, without the manual effort that usually kills the process before it starts.
Cutting Through Enterprise Data Overload
For PMs working inside large organizations with sprawling tech stacks, a significant portion of the day can disappear into the work of simply finding information. Clicking through systems, navigating tabs, cross-referencing records — it's friction that adds up. Yonelly Gutierrez, Senior Program Manager at Palo Alto Networks, uses Glean to cut through it.
"I use Glean to save time as we're working through the project initiation steps," Gutierrez explains. "We used to have to manually click into Salesforce and then go through all these separate tabs to find the information we need. Versus using Glean – you can just give it a prompt, and it just gives you the answer right there." Eliminating that search time during project initiation alone represents a meaningful reduction in low-value work at one of the most critical phases of a project.
I use Glean to save time as we’re working through the project initiation steps,
Building a Smarter Client Knowledge Base
Keeping track of what clients have said, decided, or reported across months of engagement is a challenge for any PM — and hunting through old notes and reports to find a specific detail is exactly the kind of task that slows everything down. Jennifer Goebel, Project Coordinator at Baker Marketing Laboratory, uses Notebook LLM to make that institutional knowledge instantly accessible.
"Notebook LLM, is something I definitely have used a lot. My team puts client monthly reports and any new information about the client in there," Goebel says, adding that "then, if someone's writing a blog or needs to reference, say, what a client said in a meeting last month, they could find out instead of having to go look for notes. It's made that a lot faster for sure." By centralizing client information in a tool that can be queried directly, her team has turned a time-consuming search process into a near-instant lookup.
Notebook LLM, is something I definitely have used a lot. My team puts client monthly reports and any new information about the client in there.
Solving the Right Problem
What connects all of these tools isn't a category or a price point — it's the problem they solve. Each one targets a specific type of low-value, high-volume work that quietly drains PM capacity: note-taking, scheduling, task entry, documentation, data retrieval.
The PMs seeing the biggest gains aren't necessarily using the most sophisticated platforms or automating the most complicated workflows. They're the ones who have looked honestly at where their time actually goes and found tools that eliminate the drag. That audit is worth doing.
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