Ujjwal Nambiar

We use Fireflies.ai for all our important meetings where we need things transcribed and it does an amazing job. It's a little annoying to dismiss it from meetings where you don't need it, but when you invite it to your calls, you can rest assured that you'll have a 98% accurate transcript that's searchable with attribution to all the speakers in the meeting. It's made taking meeting insights to my notes, social posts, blogs, and other pieces of content incredibly easy.

Grammarly's a useful tool to determine your common writing weak spots and work to correct them. I used it for years and made tons of progress in my writing as a result. However, as my writing skills have improved, I've found that using Grammarly too often will just make you sound the same as everyone else who uses Grammarly. I also had to delete it from my Macbook as it was holding my CPU and GPU hostage. My suggestion is once you've subsumed the correct writing protocols from Grammarly, leave it behind so you can find your own writing style again.

Jira brings to mind that quote about programming languages: “There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.” I complain about Jira daily. I don't like its UI. I don't like how it creates new items and puts them out of order. But no other tool is as comprehensive as it. There's no other tool (except maybe Notion) that's as good at making sure you get things done. So I complain about Jira. But I use it because it works.

Trello's UI is beautiful and I love the philosophy behind the kanban system, but in practice, I've never really found myself getting a lot done with it. I might just be a Todoist or Jira person...

I typically only design things when I need to, so when I'm in a time-crunch and need something quick, Canva is there to help me. I do think once you've gained some design skills, it becomes more cumbersome to use as its hand-holding methods end up strangling your creative output, but it was the perfect tool for me as someone with no design experience asked to create some image carousels for the first time.

As someone who works with a design team and isn't the best designer, I struggled initially with Figma's learning curve. But like many tools with steep learning curves, once you've picked it up, it's astonishing how quickly you can create sleek-looking mockups. We use Figma for designing our company's website and it makes the whole design process a breeze.

At the moment, this is my favourite AI tool. As someone who works at an AI company, I've learned to see through a lot of the empty hype behind many so-called AI tools. Perplexity isn't one of them. With its ability to provide sources to its answer, this has been steadily replacing Google as my main method of information search. Since it's AI, you can ask pretty open-ended questions and get decent answers. I've only seen it hallucinate a few times, and even then, it's on you to double-check the veracity of its answers with the sources it provides. It's a perfect tool in my eyes and it's only going to get better.

It's reliable, it looks good, there's plenty of storage. It's Gmail. It's a testament to their design that out of the many email clients that have risen and fallen, this one continues to last.

Business communication has never been simpler and fun(?) with Slack. The built-in integrations to tools like Salesforce continue to make it more valuable, although I am disappointed that their pricing and subscription models have become more aggressive.

Notion's flexibility makes building any organizational tool possible. From organizing projects to sorting my book notes to just jotting down a random thought, Notion has been a magnifier in my creativity and productivity. There are few products where I'm a genuine fan, but Notion is one of them.