I Automated My Calendar With AI and Stopped Double Booking Myself
I decided a few weeks ago that I wish I had a PA.
This is because my diary had quietly split itself into four places and I could no longer see my own week. Some of it was in a paper diary, some in the diary on my phone, work meetings sat in Teams where I cannot reach them from a car park on a Saturday, and a huge amount of it was buried in my inbox as booking confirmations I had read once and never thought about again.
None of these systems spoke to each other. So every time someone asked me a simple question, can you do Saturday morning, I had to check four places and I was still getting it wrong. I was double booking myself, regularly, and getting busier, not less busy.
My daughter trains around 15 hours a week and those hours move. Competitions get confirmed by email. Extra sessions get announced in a group chat at 9pm on a Tuesday. Add a full time job and there is no version of this a person can hold in their head.
So yes, I needed a PA. Then I realised I could build one instead. It took an afternoon, I wrote no code, and it now runs without me.
What I wanted
I made myself write this down before I built anything, and I think it is the reason it worked.
One calendar I can check on my phone in three seconds, not four places.
Colour coding, so I can tell what kind of week I am looking at without reading a word.
Bookings from my inbox added automatically, because that is where the double bookings were coming from.
A warning when something clashes, before I say yes to it.
Four things. I wanted the boring version that works.
What I built
The engine is Google Calendar. It is free, it is already on my phone, it syncs everywhere and it does not need me to maintain it. The useful part sits on top: I connected Claude to my Gmail and my Google Calendar, and gave it a job.
Everything lives on one calendar, colour coded:
Sports training and competitions
Work hours
Bookings pulled out of my email
School and tutoring
Four colours. I open my phone and read the shape of my week before I read any of the words in it. That sounds like a small thing. It is not a small thing.
Then I loaded in the skeleton: recurring training, the tutoring slot, the school return date, the extra sessions already confirmed. Ten minutes of setup, and everything scattered across four systems was in one.
The part that runs without me
This is where it stops being a calendar and starts being a PA.
Every morning at around 7am, a scheduled task wakes up and does four things:
Scans the last 48 hours of my inbox for bookings and confirmations.
Checks whether each one is already in the calendar, so nothing gets added twice.
Adds anything new, in the right colour.
Looks ahead 14 days for clashes and sends me a summary.
I do not open anything, forward anything, or have to remember to do it. A confirmation lands in my inbox and by the next morning it is a coloured block in my week, and if it sits on top of something else, I get told before I commit to anything.
Training changes still reach me the human way, in a group chat. So I paste the message straight into Claude and the calendar updates. Thirty seconds, instead of a rubbed out pencil line and a hope.
The bit that did not work first time
I could not get the calendar connected. Everything said it was connected. The connection showed as live, no error message anywhere, and yet Claude could not read a single event. It took several goes.
We never did find out what the cause was. What fixed it was signing in and out a few times, then disconnecting the calendar and reconnecting it. Eventually it took, and it has been solid ever since.
That is worth knowing if you try this, because the temptation at that point is to assume you have broken something and give up. I had not. Sometimes a connection just needs to be made twice.
What changed
The honest answer, after the first week, is that I stopped holding it all in my head.
I had not realised how much energy went into being the person who remembers. What time is training on Thursday, is that the week of the competition, did I already say yes to that Saturday. It ran constantly in the background and it was quietly eating me.
Now I open my phone and look.
If you want to do this yourself
Three things I would tell you.
Start with the boring backbone. Use the free calendar you already have. The automation is the interesting part, not the app.
Write your requirements down before you build anything. Every hour I saved came from refusing to build things I never asked for.
Automate the input, not the calendar. Calendars are not the hard bit. Getting information into them is. Point the automation at your inbox and your group chats, the places your life arrives from.
And start with your own mess. I did not build this as a product. I built it because I was drowning, and that turned out to be the best brief I could have had.
I am living with this system for a few weeks before I change anything, because I want to know what breaks before I write the instructions.
If you want the full build written up properly, the connectors, the scheduled task and the exact prompts I used, tell me and I will put it together. I would rather write the guide people ask for than the one I assume they want.