This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Hally Peck, a chief marketing officer at Addition Wealth in her 30s, based in New York. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
Any way that my husband and I can automate things or save time, we’re trying to.
I have two kids, and my husband also works full-time. We’re both in very demanding jobs, which means time is our most critical resource.
Before using an AI agent to help with my calendars, I was scheduling my life days or a week in advance when I really wanted to be planning for months. I found myself a bit frantic trying to figure out how to get it all done.
I’ve learned with AI that some of these automations take a lot of time to set up and run, but automating some of these life tasks has given me more time on the weekends with my kids and has been a true win for me.
I automate all of my grocery ordering with AI
As a working mom in New York City, getting to the grocery store can be a challenge, so I’ve now started giving my grocery list to an AI agent that orders all our groceries online for me.
I use Perplexity for my groceries, and I use Claude Cowork for most other tasks that I do with agents.
We typically have our groceries delivered each Sunday night. I tell my agent what we’re out of, and it knows which brands we like and have ordered from in the past, as well as things like the types of meat, cereals, and fruits we usually get.
The agent adds everything to the cart, flags any items that were out of stock, and suggests good substitutions. Then I choose a delivery time slot and get final sign-off on the order.
This wasn’t a huge, time-consuming vibe coding project. The first time I did it, it was just five to 10 minutes to set up. What used to be a pretty mindless 30-minute task is now completed in about two.
I use AI to keep our family calendar from falling apart
Any parent knows how hard it can be to manage work calendars, school schedules, activities, birthdays, and childcare logistics. I now have an agent to pull it all together for me in my Google Calendar so I can better stay on top of what is happening, when, and where.
I give Claude links to websites, spreadsheets with our work conference details, screenshots of kids’ activity schedules, the school calendar websites, and family and friends’ birthdays, and have it add them all to my calendar.
I also have it add the small things that are easy to forget, like ordering Halloween candy, class Valentine’s cards, and end-of-year teacher presents — things I’d otherwise remember only when I’m running to CVS the night before.
Recently, I gave Claude my kids’ school calendars, with all the holidays, vacations, parent-teacher conference dates, and everything else for the school year. I also had it cross-check school events against my existing calendar, and it flagged a few conflicts with work trips I already have planned.
By catching potential scheduling conflicts months in advance rather than days or weeks, we can either resolve them or better manage them.
I run these two prompts every day
I also have two prompts that run consistently for me every single day. One is a meeting preparation assistant that sends me a Slack message with the meetings I have that day at work and any relevant documents and context I need before each meeting.
The other is a notification I get at 9:30 p.m. every night that prompts me to brain dump anything on my personal or professional to-do list.
I type whatever is on my mind that I didn’t get to that day, so it’s documented somewhere. Then the next morning, it sends me a reminder so I can go back to it.
My AI agents handle school and camp logistics
When school was winding down and summer camps were starting, I entered this transition period where the mental load was heavy, and something always felt like it was slipping through the cracks.
This year, I had a Perplexity AI agent help me sign my kids up for camps and fill out those forms. I helped by providing the agent with all the basic information, such as names and date of birth. I also have some saved files with personal information as access points for the agents to source from, and it runs alongside the browser, so I can jump in if needed.
Having an AI agent do this on a separate browser while I’m working on something else is helpful, and means I’ll actually get the forms done and not forget.
I still need to find the time to automate more tasks
It would be amazing to say everything is running 100% on AI, but you still need to put the work in to get it to the output you want.
Up next for me is setting up a separate email for my AI agent so I can forward things there. I think it might help me centralize things better and make prompting easier. Right now, I give my agent a lot of screenshots, but I think if I gave it an inbox and set up a forwarding mechanism based on filtering criteria from my email, it would streamline things even more.
There are definitely tasks on my to-do list where I think, “Oh, I’d really love to have AI handle this,” and it can. I just need to find the time to go in and actually set up all the systems needed to deliver the output I want.
Do you have a story to share about AI life hacks? If so, please reach out to the reporter at [email protected].
Read the full article here
