Can AI Fix My Terrible Schedule?

I’m not ashamed to admit that I have trouble scheduling tasks and using my freetime wisely. The allure of wasting time playing video games, doomscrolling on YouTube or what-have-you is just too strong for me to overcome sometimes. As such, I attempted to use the tools available to me to fix my shortcomings – that’s where AI enters the picture.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past three years, you probably know about generative AI. Some use it for debugging code, writing emails, as a search engine, or even as an image creation tool¹. I, however, decided to do something radical: actually use the advice it gave me.

I fed ChatGPT a bit of information, such as what days I’m at school, what my schedule looks like, and what my goals are for my schedule. My message looked a little something like:

I am a computer science university student seeking to develop a better schedule for this upcoming quarter of study.
Please help me develop a better schedule keeping the following in mind:

1. I’d like to wake up no later than 8am, and go to bed no later than 11pm.
2. I am on campus [from x time to y time]
3. I do better with a scheduled environment rather than with free space.
4. I need a roughly 2 hour block each day for exercise, preferably in the early evening.
5. It takes me roughly 45 minutes to get to and from campus.
6. I’d like some time every day for religious meditation and reflection.
7. I’d like some time every day for projects and personal study.
8. I need time every day for work on homework.
9. On the weekends, I’d like some time for meal prepping.

It spat out a plaintext schedule, which I modified with its help and imported into Google Calendar. After formatting it, it looked like this:

Putting the Schedule in Practice

On one of the days I did not have class, I decided to follow along with it.

Conclusions

tl;dr: I really enjoyed the schedule it made for me. I never felt like I was working on one thing for too long, so as to avoid burnout.

I recommend you try it out! Give it a shot and let me know what you think.

Pros

I usually have a lot of trouble getting up in the mornings (I like to sleep), but with this schedule, I found it easy to get up in the morning and felt refreshed by the amount of time I was able to sleep.

I didn’t stagnate or procrastinate in my work, because I was always switching gears; I never felt trapped or bored in one topic or unit of work.

I felt satisified with the amount of work I did: I was able to push a few changes to my personal project’s repo, complete a homework assignment, and get a killer chest pump in the gym.

Cons

I felt a little on edge, trying to scramble to meet the next task assigned to me. This could be eased with a timer or alarm, so I don’t have to keep checking my phone to see if I’m behind or not.

I found that it scheduled things a little too close together, in that hardly had any time to transition between tasks. However, that can be ironed out with a simple prompt, like:

Give me an extra 30 minutes between the gym and studying in order to get back and shower.

An example prompt for you to use

Copy-paste into your AI companion of choice, replacing the square brackets with pertinent info. Good luck!

I am a [role] seeking to develop a more productive, healthy schedule.  
Please help me develop a better schedule keeping the following in mind:
1. I'd like to wake up no later than [wake up time], and go to bed no later than [bedtime].
2. I have obligations [from x to y time, on z days]
3. I do better with a [scheduled or flexible schedule].
4. I need a roughly [x] hour block each day for exercise, preferably [at time].
7. I'd like some time every day for [good habits here].
8. On the weekends, I'd like some time for [productive hobbies].