Managing a busy weekly schedule for a family of four can sometimes feel like working blindfolded. From professional commitments to personal errands and kids’ activities, there’s always a lot going on, making finding a balance a big challenge.
There are a variety of tools that can help, but new solutions are always welcome. One thing I tried recently that really helped? ChatGPT!
Initial Setup
Yes, you read that right. I’m already using AI to help me decide what to eat, so why not use it to help boost my and my family’s organization? By integrating this technology into my scheduling routine, I can remove a little clutter from my calendar and create weekly plans that fit my life.
The first step to using ChatGPT as a personal scheduling assistant is to build a foundation. My goal was to leverage ChatGPT to not only organize my schedule, but also create a more mindful approach to time management.
Before I began, I sat down and set some clear personal goals that I wanted for organization and productivity. Such as finding time for myself, meeting work goals, scheduling daily and weekly activities, etc. Overall, I wanted my new schedule to increase time efficiency, reduce stress, and prioritize tasks with more clarity.
Now, I admit that while I was very excited to see what ChatGPT would bring, I set my expectations low. This isn’t necessarily what the AI was designed for, so I knew I had to tweak it a bit so that it would do what I wanted. So don’t expect a unique solution, but rather a ready-made guideline for your days and weeks.
Using ChatGPT to plan
I started by making a list of daily and weekly events that needed to be taken care of. Wake-up times, getting my kid to school, meetings and project due dates all fell into this list spontaneously. I made sure to keep track of who had to do what, so that the AI could group things and events together appropriately. I also prioritized certain tasks, especially when they overlapped with each other.
Then, I fed all of that directly into ChatGPT, and it pulled up the daily and weekly details for me. The result was surprisingly easy to follow, but also lacked depth. To mitigate this, I started to really get into it and mold the experience, as well as take notes on what worked and what didn’t.
During this process I found that ChatGPT needed a lot of help to get good results. You have to “teach” it what things should be prioritized, and encourage it to reason about ways to make things easier for you.
Telling it to “prioritize family time” or “find ways to manage time more efficiently” yielded good results; ChatGPT will also make suggestions on ways to organize or streamline work during the week in a really helpful way.
Benefits of the ChatGPT Schedule
Now, the benefits of ChatGPT are obvious. First of all, I didn’t have to sit down and plan every hour myself – instead, the AI did it for me and listed it in an easy to follow manner. I also noticed that as I progressed through the week, I saved a lot of time by following the schedule.
See, I’ve never been good at time management. I’ll spend an extra hour playing games instead of cleaning or lose myself working on a project at the expense of others. Or maybe I don’t realize it’s time to make dinner until it’s too late. But by making a list every day I could see how my time and energy was being allocated and by following that structure, I felt like I was actually getting things done.
Plus, I felt like my whole family had more time and were more on track. By letting everyone work at specific times, we had more time to spend on shared activities. Or by following suggestions, such as preparing meals on a certain day to save time at the end of the week, the time that was spent was being used more wisely.
Challenges and lessons learned
Despite the “benefits” of this process, there were also obstacles. There were some limitations, such as ChatGPT’s initial difficulty handling complex, multi-step tasks that required more than one person or overlapping times. I had to implement adjustments and give clear instructions, which gradually increased the effectiveness of the AI rather than it instinctively knowing what I wanted.