Surviving the relentless pressure of a top-tier business school requires more than just intellect; it demands ruthless efficiency.
Between case studies, committee meetings, networking events, and group projects, the workload can quickly become overwhelming. Rakshit Ravindranathan, an MBA candidate at IIM Bangalore, experienced this firsthand when he missed an important assignment deadline.
The information was scattered across WhatsApp groups, the academic portal, and his own memory.
That slip-up triggered a realization. Trying to track every commitment manually was not working. Rakshit realized he needed a different approach.
Instead of relying on another notebook or pushing himself to remember everything, he handed the task over to AI.
Outsourcing the “Mental Overhead”
The mechanics of how Rakshit and his peers use AI for time management represent a fundamental shift in how we handle daily tasks.
Instead of manually updating calendars or maintaining complex to-do lists, the strategy revolves around centralizing unstructured data.
Rakshit uses Anthropic’s Claude to build a productivity system that tracks upcoming deadlines, pending tasks, and perhaps most importantly commitments he casually agreed to weeks prior and completely forgot.
The beauty of this system is that it operates as an external brain. By feeding raw, messy inputs into an AI tool, the technology does the heavy lifting of parsing dates, urgency, and task requirements. It processes the noise and outputs a clean, structured schedule.
This approach isn’t limited to one specific software. While Rakshit leans on Claude, the ecosystem is highly adaptable.
Other IIM students wire ChatGPT directly into their digital calendars via API integrations or rely on Google’s Gemini to seamlessly pull action items straight from their Workspace emails and documents.
The specific application doesn’t actually matter. What matters is the intentional offloading of “mental overhead.”
By allowing AI to bridge the gap between scattered communication platforms and a singular source of truth, students preserve their cognitive bandwidth for high-level problem-solving rather than administrative bookkeeping.
Why the ‘Busy’ Flex is Dead
There is a broader professional shift happening here that extends far beyond university campuses. Rakshit captured the changing tide perfectly, noting that just two years ago, being chronically disorganized was treated almost as an endearing personality trait. It was a side effect of being “busy.”
Today, that excuse no longer holds weight. High-powered productivity tools are sitting right at our fingertips, mostly for free.
When an AI can ingest a 50-message WhatsApp thread and instantly block out your calendar for the required deliverables, dropping the ball is no longer an understandable human error. It is a refusal to adapt.
The gap between professionals who leverage these tools and those who rely on brute-force memory is rapidly showing up in the quality and consistency of their output. Managing time through AI isn’t about packing more grunt work into a 24-hour day. It is about building an automated safety net.
For modern professionals and MBA candidates alike, the ultimate competitive advantage no longer belongs to the person who can juggle the most responsibilities. It belongs to the person who builds a system so they never have to juggle in the first place.
Source: NDTV, "How An IIM Bangalore MBA Student Uses AI to Stay Organised And Meet Deadlines"
