Summary
Time management has been a struggle for me ever since leaving college. Things worsened when COVID-19 hit, and I lost all structure for my day. Luckily, I understand how to use AI to help me with my time management. It turned out better than expected and gave me much-needed time back.
The Breaking Point
I have always been a bit of an ideas guy. Fromusing AI to code a video gameto writing my own personal fiction, I’ve picked up a lot of hobbies over the years. The problem is when my hobbies start taking over my personal time and when I start losing track of what should happen when.
Traditional time management methods weren’t working for me. Sure, I’d useWindows 11’s built-in Pomodoro timerto get some productivity in, but it almost constantly felt like I was spinning my wheels in the mud. Meetings would run past me, and I’d only realize it after the hour was long past. There’s a limit to how much being hyperfocused helps you, and this was that limit.
After deciding things needed to change, I started setting up my Google Calendar to give me"blocks" of time for focusing. It worked out well at the start, but as things changed, it became more challenging to stick to that set schedule over time. Things would pop up unexpectedly and cut into my time. Since I was already using AI for a few things, I decided to see if it could help me with my time management.
Choosing the Right AI Companion
Several AI models and specialized AI planning tools can help you create a time management plan. I already use ChatGPT quite extensively, as well as Claude AI, for things like assignment planning and structuring workflows for personal projects. I figured it would be easy to move this over to a daily planner that gave me what I needed out of it.
Alongside typical AI agents, I also checked a fewspecialized AI toolswith free versions to see how they matched up. Unfortunately, no AI agent seems to do individual, personalized scheduling; most are only commercial products aimed at businesses and team leaders. While I could adapt to those things, the cost and time invested in learning those systems weren’t worthwhile. I figured my best bet would be to use one of the AI systems I frequently employ.
Between Claude and ChatGPT, I opted for ChatGPT since it was much easier to communicate time-based efficiency to the agent.Claude’s AI is incredible for collaborative coding and code review, but it doesn’t lend itself that well to planning as much. GPT doesn’t have integration with my other planning tools (Google Calendar and the Pomodoro timer), so I had to set up the tasks that it gave me manually. Now, the only thing left was to get ChatGPT to plan my day for me.
Prompting ChatGPT to Plan My Days
So, to make my time-management plan work, I had to focus on a few key details:
For this, I used an AI prompt framework calledSAID (Situation, Action, Impact, and Detail)that helps ChatGPT place itself in my shoes. I asked it for this:
ChatGPT’s initial response was to ask me a series of questions that helped it get an idea of what my energy levels and priorities looked like:
I answered all the ChatGPT questions, and it put together a pretty detailed timeline for a regular working day and some exceptions that I gave it. I took the result and threw it into Google Calendar, along with some color coding. This is what my days (more or less) look like now:
These tasks are repeated weekly, giving me a structured outline of my day.I also use Sectographto get a graphical view of my day and see what’s coming up.
Given enough time, I’m sure I could come up with this daily plan myself. However, if I wanted to be efficient about it, using an AI agent to plan my day cut down the amount of time I spent doing actual planning. From using this tool, I noticed a few positives that stand out:
However, there are distinct downsides to using ChatGPT for this, including:
Much Better Than Planning Your Day Yourself
ChatGPT isn’t a perfect personal assistant. It can help you with many things, like looking up efficient flights to places you need to travel or blocking out periods of your day for work and relaxation. While it’s limited in scope, it’s not bad for a personal planning tool. Until commercial AI ventures release one dedicated to individual daily planning, using ChatGPT isn’t a bad solution. It worked for me.
