THE MOMENT
Monday night. Kids in bed. I'd been out of the house since 7am.
I opened the parents WhatsApp group to check the Easter hat parade time — knowing I'd need to move some meetings to be there.
Forty. Seven. Unread messages.
Mostly photos of hats. Beautiful hats. Hats that had clearly been made over the weekend by parents who had not, like me, forgotten until Monday night.
Somewhere in all of that noise was the thing I needed.
I found it. Hat parade, 9:30am Thursday. Into the calendar it went.
Then I sat there thinking. Why am I losing my mind over a hat parade. There has to be a better way.
So, the next morning I built a skill.
(A skill, for context, is an instruction file that lives in Claude Cowork. It tells Claude what to do when certain things come up.)
This Skill reads every email that comes in (weekly), looks for anything related to my kids. It pulls out dates, deadlines, events, things that need action. And it adds them to my calendar automatically.
Two daycares. One primary school. Swimming, drums, football, dance.
It also adds Ben, my husband, to the invite.
Ben mentioned the hat parade without me reminding him later that week.
I'm not going to oversell what that felt like. But I will say: it felt a little bit magic.
Then… I LEFT the WhatsApp group!
THE SKILL — FOR CLAUDE
If you use Claude Pro and want this running automatically - reading your emails, adding events to your calendar, no lifting of fingers - the skill file is free to my subscribers. Not subscribed yet? Subscribe at promptmum.ai and it'll land in your inbox.
Takes about 10 minutes. Download, upload into Claude, ask Claude to help you personalise it. Any questions? Ask Claude. 😄
THE PROMPT — FOR EVERYONE ELSE
No paid Claude? No problem. Copy this into ChatGPT, Gemini, or any free AI and paste a school email underneath it:
You are my family's school admin assistant. I'm going to paste in an email from my child's school or childcare. Please: 1. Extract any important dates, events, or deadlines — date, time, event title 2. Flag anything I need to action (permission slips, payments, RSVPs, items to bring) 3. Give me a one-line summary of what I need to do and by when
Here is the email: [paste here]
Try it tonight on whatever's sitting unread.
I made it to the hat parade. It was chaotic and loud and over in eleven minutes. Funny how those moments bring you so much joy.
NEXT WEEK
The skill I’m building in preparation for 2 weeks of "I'm booooored” for the school holidays.
See you then!!