Essays take me 8 hours—what tools do you actually use to save time?

Here’s how my essay workflow used to look:

• Research: about 2 hours
• Planning and outlining: another 2 hours (this part drained me the most)
• Writing: around 3 hours
• Editing and citations: roughly 1 hour

So I was spending close to 8 hours on a single essay.

After I started using Draftris for the planning part, that 2‑hour outlining phase dropped to about several minutes, which is a massive difference. Now the whole process takes me closer to one hour.

What about you—what do you use to speed this up? Does anyone else use AI for structure or editing? What actually saves you the most time?

I’m especially interested in any productivity tricks or tools that make essay writing less of a grind.