How I got 4 hours back (and exhaled for the first time in weeks)

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It’s end of school year, which means I have been living and dying by THE spreadsheet. You know the one. The camps spreadsheet that contains timing, location, pick ups, after care, friends in the camps.

I have two kids. Mostly in different camps because my daughter is only 4. Different drop-off times. Different gear lists. Five birthday parties coming in like calendar Jenga; two of them are on the same Saturday. Two preschool graduations this week alone.

For months, besides that spreadsheet, all of the details lived in one place: my head.

I’d be in a work meeting doing pick-up math in the background. I’d lie awake Tuesday night trying to remember which friend was at which camp and whether someone needed to wear jeans for horseback riding or a swimsuit for water play. My brain was running a second job I wasn’t getting paid for.

Researchers at the University of Bath found that mothers carry about 7 out of 10 household mental-load tasks, regardless of income or career level. That’s the invisible job. And I’d been carrying it for years without questioning whether I had to.

So I got curious. I opened Claude, described my frustration out loud using the voice feature, and asked it to turn birthday invite screenshots and carpool chaos that I spoke into the app into clickable calendar entries, time zone set, husband included. That was the whole prompt.

It worked. I refined it over a week. Then I did the scary thing: fed THE camp spreadsheet in all at once. Twenty minutes later, every entry was on a shared family calendar.

Four hours saved. But the exhale was the thing. I’d been carrying that for weeks. And suddenly I wasn’t.

The reframe: a skill is just a prompt you want to do again. You’re not building software. You’re just saving something that worked.

If you’ve been hesitant to start, here’s exactly how I’d do it:

Step 1: Find the friction. What’s something you do repetitively that you dread? Not a big hairy work problem, but something small and annoying. Mine was “I have to manually enter every kid’s schedule and my husband still doesn’t know what’s happening.” That’s the thing. Find your thing.

Step 2: Describe it out loud to Claude like you’re complaining to a friend. Don’t overthink the format. I like clicking the microphone on the Claude app or even doing a voice memo (making sure transcription is turned on). Just say what’s frustrating and what you wish would happen instead. That description? That’s your first prompt.

Step 3: Use it a few times. See where it works and where it breaks. This counts as testing. Tweak the output. When it’s working consistently, when you’d want to do it again save it. (You literally say - Claude - save this as a skill). That’s a skill. Literally just a prompt you’ve decided is worth keeping, that you can now pull up any tim.

That’s the whole move. No coding. No app. Just: frustration → prompt → skill.

One of my best friends Whitney Stefko Dover, Ford exec, mom, one of the sharpest people I know, built her family an AI “chief of staff” that briefs her every morning on the day ahead. We’re a small and growing group of working parents figuring this out by testing, not waiting for permission.

The distance isn’t having the right tool. It’s the curiosity to keep poking at it until it works for your actual life.

You don’t have to hold all of it in your head. You just have to get a little curious.

What’s something you’ve been meaning to test? Hit reply I’d love to hear it.

Xo,

Mary

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P.S. Want the calendar skill I built? Reply to this email, or DM me on LinkedIn with the word SKILL and I’ll send it over.