On Monday morning, Marta, owner of a nine-person design studio, asks three questions in chat, makes two phone calls and scrolls through a thread with 40 messages. Only then does she know where to start. If you're wondering how to improve employee productivity with AI, start with moments like this: not with how fast people work, but with the work needed just to get back into it.
Employee productivity with AI starts with organisation
First remove unnecessary tasks surrounding the work, and only then hand part of it over to AI. The Assistant can summarise a conversation, but it won't decide for your team who's responsible for a matter nobody has been assigned to.
Run a simple test: where do you look for the latest arrangements, how many times do you ask about status, and what do you retype from one place to another? If the answers lead to several private channels, adopt this rule: one matter, one place, one responsible person and a deadline. You can read more about this first change in the article on why teams lose track of agreements.
1. The information already exists, but nobody knows where
You'll reduce time spent searching for information when arrangements stay with the matter they concern. AI can help surface them if it has access to the right task or chat.
On Tuesday, Marta is looking for client ABC's decision. Instead of asking the team again, she points the AI Assistant to the “Client arrangements” chat and the meeting notes, then asks about what was agreed. Marta gets an answer citing the chat and notes she selected. The Assistant can also draw on the content and attachments of a task or chat you have access to once you give its name - without opening the thread.
Global search works by task and chat names, and in Notes and Files also by content (the Files module is part of the Pro plan). You select the sources for a conversation with AI manually in both the Standard and Pro plans. Only Pro has an AI knowledge base that indexes tasks, chats, notes and files to answer without selecting sources each time. You can read about the capabilities and limits of this feature on the AI Assistant page.
2. Every tab switch breaks the context
You'll reduce app-switching when a task, conversation and deadline live close together. But don't move everything mechanically - first decide where the team records the decision it will come back to later.
On Wednesday, Marta is preparing a proposal and checks the date in the Calendar, the conversation within the task, and a draft in Notes. Task Manager keeps Tasks, Chats, Calendar, Board and Notes in a single browser window. Marta switches between Calendar and Notes using the view icon, without leaving the window. A Workspace groups the tasks and chats for a given matter, and the “All” view shows them together.
If email and documents should also be in this window, you need the Pro plan: that's where Mail and Files are available. The difference between bringing work together and adding yet another tab is described in the article on one tool instead of several.
3. After a break, you have to read the whole thread again
The AI Assistant can summarise a conversation when you return to a long thread after a break. The Organise feature also makes it easier to read individual messages without changing the originals.
Tomek returns on Thursday after four days of holiday. In the “Client arrangements” chat, he privately asks about 14 messages from the last three days and gets a summary split into decisions, deadlines and responsible people. He asks the question using the “AI Assistant” button next to the reply field; the result, marked “FOR YOU ONLY”, isn't visible to other participants.
After his holiday, Tomek can choose Summarise mode in Organise to see 1-2 sentences per message, or switch back to the Original content. Enhance and Expert modes are also available. Organise processes messages in batches of eight, starting with the newest; you can pull in older ones separately. The result disappears after the session, the originals remain, and processed messages carry the warning “AI can make mistakes”. So before passing a deadline on to a client, check it in the source conversation.
4. The question “where are we at?” comes back every morning
Status should be visible on the task itself, without having to ask someone else for an update. If a matter has a description, deadline, assigned people and a conversation in one thread, you can replace the question with simply checking its status.
On Thursday, Marta opens the list instead of messaging Kasia "is the offer ready yet?". A task's status can be changed with one click from the list by someone with the right permission. The due date colour means: red - overdue, blue - due today, green - on track, grey - no due date or the task is closed. The "On track", "Due today", "Overdue" and "Chat" tiles count matters and filter the list.
The thread logs, among other things, a change of status and due date, including its previous value. In the task description you can include a shared to-do list: participants tick off items, see the progress and a mini avatar of the person who checked the point. It's a record of agreements, not a way of rating people. If a manager only needs to keep track of a matter, the observer role gives them visibility into the thread without adding the task to their work for the day. We cover other ways of tracking deadlines in how to keep track of team task deadlines.
5. The boss becomes a living reminder
Pin a reminder to a task's due date instead of remembering it on other people's behalf. In Task Manager, a personal reminder like this can shift along with the matter's due date.
On Monday, Marta asks the AI Assistant: "Remind me a day before the deadline about the offer for Nord". She checks the date and clicks "Yes, do it" - without confirmation, the reminder isn't created. When she later pushes the task's due date back by a week, the pinned reminder moves along with it. A task without a due date instead requires a reminder set for a specific date and time.
You can turn on a daily task digest in your profile: once a day it shows your tasks due today and overdue, by default at 8:00. The Notification Centre also reminds you of an event 15 minutes beforehand and of a task an hour before its due date; the morning briefing is shown when you open the app, if the day isn't empty.
Note: when the app is fully closed, sending reminders by email requires a CRON job - a recurring task that the administrator sets up on the server for the whole installation. Notifications within the open app don't require this setting.
6. A report is built by copying out existing data
Start a report from the data already saved against tasks, not by reconstructing the week from memory. The AI Assistant can put together an answer from it or prepare a file to download, which you check before sending.
On Friday, Kasia puts together a summary of six tasks. She asks for a table with status and due date, checks the rows, then downloads an Excel spreadsheet. The Assistant prepares the content and Task Manager assembles the file. An Excel or CSV spreadsheet requires tabular data. Word, PDF and HTML files are also available, and you can export a single message to PDF, Word or TXT. A similar process is shown in the article weekly report from the team's tasks.
If the source is an attachment, the format matters. The Assistant reads digital PDF, DOCX and XLSX documents, but it won't read a scanned PDF without a text layer: there's no OCR function, meaning no recognition of text from an image. In that case you need a document with text, or text prepared separately.
7. Every email reply starts from scratch
You can shorten repetitive correspondence by preparing a draft on the matter and checking it before sending. In Task Manager, reading and sending emails alongside tasks is provided by Mail in the Pro plan.
On Wednesday, Ola replies to a customer's question about the offer's deadline. She drafts a reply in the editor and uses "Improve text" to polish the language without changing the list layout; if she doesn't like the result, she undoes the change. She can also ask the AI Assistant for a translation. The Assistant prepares the email from her connected, personal inbox, but sends it only after confirmation; without an inbox connected, it won't send anything. The inbox is private - not even the administrator can see it.
The Pro plan also includes Automations, i.e. "WHEN - IF - DO" rules. One of the triggers is a new email; before activating a rule, you can test it without executing the actions. Automation doesn't, however, replace the decision of what to reply to the customer.
Start with one place, not seven changes at once
Choose the place that most often triggers questions in your team. Only once you've settled on how matters are recorded should you decide which task to hand over to AI.
| Where time disappears | The team's first move | What AI can add |
|---|---|---|
| Searching for agreements | Record them on the matter | An answer from an available thread |
| Switching windows | Establish one place to work | A question in the task's context |
| Reading long conversations | Record decisions in the thread | Conversation summary |
| Status questions | Fill in the due date and people involved | Question about overdue tasks |
| Manual reminding | Give the task a due date | A reminder pinned to the due date |
| Copying out reports | Keep tasks up to date | A table or a file to download |
| Writing emails from scratch | Keep the reply with the matter | Editing and translating the draft |
Task Manager also works without AI, so you can start with tasks and chats. If you switch on the AI Assistant later, you'll use your own OpenAI, Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude or xAI Grok key and pay the model provider directly, with no intermediary markup. The app's data stays on your own server; hosting with PHP and MySQL is enough. However, content you give to the Assistant is sent to the model provider under your key - that's a separate decision about data.
The licence is perpetual and covers a one-off payment for the number of seats, with no monthly subscription per person. It includes 12 months of updates, and renewing afterwards is optional. The Standard plan costs: Starter for up to 8 people - PLN 690, Classic for up to 20 people - PLN 1,490, Max for up to 35 people - PLN 2,290. The Pro plan for these packages costs PLN 1,990, PLN 3,990 and PLN 5,990 respectively.
Tomorrow, pick one matter that people ask about most often. For a week, record its agreements in a single thread, with a person responsible and a due date; then check whether it still needs chasing. If you're running a team that wants to keep the app's data on their own premises and not pay a subscription for every person, see what this kind of work looks like in the Demo.
Frequently asked questions
Does AI really improve employee productivity?
Yes - AI can reduce specific tasks, such as reading a long thread, building a table or polishing a draft message. It won't replace deciding who's responsible for a task and by when.
Can the AI Assistant see all tasks and conversations in the company?
No - the AI Assistant works on tasks and chats you have access to; an administrator has access to all tasks and chats. Other participants don't see a private question and answer within a thread.
Is this a tool for monitoring employees?
No - the approach described here is meant to reduce back-and-forth questions, not to evaluate people. The thread records task changes so the team can reconstruct what was agreed.
Do I need to use AI to use Task Manager?
No, Task Manager works without AI. The administrator can later set up the AI Assistant using their own key from a chosen model provider.
Which of the described features require the Pro plan?
The Pro plan is needed for Mail, Files, Automations and the AI knowledge base that answers without manually pointing to sources. The AI Assistant in tasks and chats, Organise, and manual source selection for conversations work in both plans.
Sources
The Task Manager Team - we write about teamwork, AI in business and keeping tasks organised, using examples from Task Manager, software installed on your own server. Task Manager has been developed by Blue Creation Group (Piotr Łącz) since 2013 and is used by organisations including Neonet, the Military University of Technology and Polpharma - read customer reviews. We check our articles against the user guide and the latest version of the software.
