we just joined a new school and i noticed multiple calendar collisions between my work calendar and the school calendar almost immediately. so i thought, how can i simplify this? and of course i thought of what claude could do to help me since i have no time to figure this out in my spare time (what spare time?!?!).
sooo today i’m gonna walk you through the prompt i used to catch every single school event / early release / closure that is about to happen on a work day between now and january. then we can look at how i got it to run itself every sunday so i never have to think about it again!
bc here’s my actual problem right?! the concerts and the early releases live in the school app, my meetings live in outlook, the birthday parties and the dentist live in google, and none of those three talk to each other. so i’ve already had two school things land right on top of work things this month and found out the night before both times.
i already counted the closed days, 28 of them this year, and that one i wrote up separately.
closed days are easy, you know about those in august. the problem is the tuesday 10am kind. the concert, the early release nobody flagged, the party that needs 24 store bought cupcakes, the pajama day. those land on top of something already on my calendar and i find out too late to move it.
10 minutes. you need the school calendar and a rough idea of your normal work week.
here is my kid’s school calendar for the semester. [paste it or upload the pdf]
and here is what my work weeks normally look like. [paste your recurring meetings, or just describe them, ex: standup every monday 9am, team meeting every other thursday 2pm, month end is always the last 3 days]
i work a full time job with fixed hours. put these two side by side and find every single day between now and january 5 where a school thing lands on top of a work thing.
for each one give me: the date, the day of the week, what the school thing is, what it’s colliding with, whether i actually have to be there in person, and how many days of notice i’d want to deal with it.
sort them worst to easiest. and flag any week that has two of them in it.
run it in your own chatgpt or claude or gemini login and not the one work gave you, bc your kid’s name and school and schedule all end up in there and on a work account your admin can see every bit of it.
you get back every conflict between now and january, in august, instead of the night before.
mine was the new school. it’s full time, and i did not realize how many staff development days they had that i’d need to find extra coverage for, and i didn’t realize they do shorter hours around the holiday weeks either. it’s fine, it’s just not something i was planning for.
and my family lives 3 hours away, and the family we do have local travels a lot around that same time. we don’t have a regular nanny to take over and the sitters book up fast around the holidays. so it was 5 or 6 days of coverage just this semester that i had to go figure out.
i like knowing that kind of thing ahead of time so i can actually budget for it and plan it out !
1. the ones where you have to be there go on your work calendar today, as busy, with a normal boring title. december is still empty right now so nobody’s gonna question it.
2. the ones where you just have to send something in get added to the next grocery order that same day. store bought is fine !!
3. any week with two of them, my husband takes one and i take the other, and we decide that part NOW while it’s still just a calendar and not a wednesday night.
4. whatever’s left over is your actual coverage problem, so grandma, camps, his pto, my pto, etc.
i did all of that in one sitting at the kitchen table and it took maybe 40 minutes.
separate topic, but it’s the season. i rebought the whole daycare list this year bc of the new place, new backpack, new labels, new lunchbox, new nap mat, new water bottles. 34 things. these 4 are the ones that changed something.
the backpack, but picked around the actual drop off. at our old place i brought lunch every single day so the bag came home every night, and at the new one it just stays there all week except on friday it has to fit a folder. that’s the whole spec !! so i picked the size around that instead of around what it looked like.
the labels that stretch instead of stick. i did the sticker ones for two years and kept peeling them off the inside of the dishwasher like an idiot. these are rubber and they stretch onto bottles and cups and jars and they do not come off. it’s a $12 problem i paid for four separate times before i fixed it lol.
the stain spray i keep on deck. miss mouth’s, and i mean ON DECK, one in the diaper bag, one in the car, one at home. paint, food, mystery stains i don’t ask about.
the freezer style lunchbox. we did the lunchbox + ice pack thing forever and it never stayed cold enough for me to feel good about it, and this one stays cold way longer (older kid version here) so i stopped doing that mental check at 3pm about whether the yogurt was still fine.
and the backup clothes for the cubby, which i still buy, i just stopped buying nice ones, so an organic onesie pack lives in there and i genuinely could not care less what happens to it.
everything else, the bottles and the formula pitcher and the sunscreen that lives in their cubby all year and the snacks and the wet dry bags, is all written out here with every link and there’s a couple discount codes on that page too. if you’d rather just scroll it, the whole thing is in one amazon list, plus teacher gift ideas here if you wanna get ahead of december (which i say every single year and then do not do lol).
and if dinner is the part falling apart right now, all 28 of the one pan ones i actually make are written out here.
i ran it once in august. two weeks later the school sent 6 more emails, none of which were on the calendar i pasted in, so it was already out of date.
every prompt has this problem, it’s only true the day you run it. and i am not re-pasting a calendar every sunday, i’d do it twice and quit.
so i built the version that does it without me.
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