Do you not have enough time scheduled in your week to get your stuff done?
I didn’t, last week. My company generated a metric ton of work for me and my team, and I spent the week heads down catching up. I even missed doing my LinkedIn games yesterday. The horror.
One thing that helped me claw back time: the automations I run to lock in my schedule. About 90% of my calendar is meetings, so if I want to actually get work done, I have to fight for the blocks to do it in.
If you’ve got a pile of projects and no idea how to slot them in, here’s AI 101 for calendar scheduling. Beginner to advanced.
Beginner
- Write down your projects and rough timeframes. Doesn’t matter where it lives, Word, Notepad, whatever you’ve already got.
- Screenshot your calendar.
- Upload both to your AI of choice and tell it to schedule you into the open time, then generate an ICS file you can import into Outlook, Gmail, whatever. It’ll take some creative liberties with how long things take you, but if you use AI regularly, it’s usually close.
Advanced
- Connect your calendar directly, through the web app or an MCP, so your AI can pull your scheduled items itself.
- Do the same with wherever your task list actually lives (Word doc, Google Docs, Tasks, Evernote in my case).
- Tell it: here’s the list, here’s the calendar, auto-populate and generate an ICS.
Notice what I didn’t say: put it on my calendar for me.
Two reasons. First, I don’t trust a robot to do that correctly. It might delete something. Second, my company would not love me connecting my actual work calendar to an AI they have zero control over.
An ICS file is universal and about as low-risk as a file format gets. I’ve never had one break anything.