Death by scheduling

At least once a week, Leo comes home with something in his backpack that has a date to remember. Then there's the PTO events, the local community events, the random things I find on instagram or facebook. The texts about parties. The email confirmation for the Lowes workshop. I'm a screenshotter, which is great until I forgot I took the screenshot and never load it into my calendar. And if it's not in my calendar, it doesn't exist.

This edition: My screenshot -> calendar skill.

This one is dead simple. Realistically it shouldn't require AI. But again, my goal is to hand off where I'm failing at executive functioning. The number of times a week (or even sometimes a day) that I have to add something to my calendar is approaching comical and I'm coming to accept that anything that can be "set and forget" is a good task for my squad of agents. I made this skill back in March while I was walking to Disneyland from the hotel and it's been paying dividends ever since.

Now, I take an image, send it to my agent, and everything I could possibly need about the event is put in my calendar according to my pre-defined rules. It's one of those little magical things that just makes my life easier.

Just adding things to a calendar is cool. That, in itself, would save me a bunch of time. But where this skill works best for me is the rules I set around how to handle events so that they hit my eyeballs at the right time. A school event on my calendar at its actual time is useless to me. "Picture day, 10:00AM Tuesday" - Leo is already at school at 10AM. We're well past the point of being able to do anything useful about it.

The school day rule: if it's a school-day event, don't put it on the calendar at the event time. Put a 15-minute heads-up at 7:00AM that morning instead, with a 🎒 on it, and write the prep in the description. Dress him in green and gold for spirit day. Bring a toy that starts with the letter R. Walking field trip - comfy shoes and layers. It comes back to me while I'm in getting-ready-for-school-mode, at the exact moment I can do something about it before it slips my mind.

A couple of other rules I gave it, because the defaults annoyed me:

None of this is fancy. It's modeled after how I function. I trained it once, and I never have to think about it again. Now everything that needs to be put on my calendar goes from a 2 minute task to a 10 second task. It's the difference between a system I actually keep using and one whose novelty wears off by day 5.

My version runs through one of my OpenClaw agents - the same always-on setup behind my meal planning. When a flyer shows up, I text the photo to my agent on Telegram, it reads the image, writes the event to my Google Calendar, and texts me back what it did. If the new event lands on top of something I already have, it flags the conflict so I can decide what to do, if anything.

You don't need any of that to get the same result. If you use Claude with skills, this is a skill plus a calendar connection - set it up once and every image you send gets handled this way. It's how I originally set up the skill. If you don't want a skill at all, drop a screenshot into a regular chat with any AI that can see your calendar and tell it to make the event. The agent version just means I never re-explain my rules.

I put together a starter version if you want it. It's got the skill and the preferences written out so you can see how the rules are structured, then change them to fit your life. Maybe your kid's school does early dismissal and you want a different heads-up time. Maybe you don't have a kid and you just want fun event posts to stop dying in your camera roll.