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. Of course it clashed with a work call.
Into the calendar it went.
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 — automatically, on a schedule, without you having to remember.)
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.
Then… I LEFT the parents WhatsApp group.
THE SKILL — FOR CLAUDE USERS
I highly doubt your kids go to my kids' school, so I created a template you can personalise with a few questions from Claude. Takes about 10 minutes. Just install the file and Claude will walk you through the rest.
If you use Claude Pro and want this running automatically - reading your emails, adding events to your calendar - all you have to do is:
Download the PDF below (School Digest Personalised Skill.pf)
Upload the same PDF to Claude (claude.ai or Cowork — either works)
Type
go!Answer 5 questions
Copy the generated
SKILL.mdin Customise > Skills
THE MANUAL PROMPT — FOR PEOPLE WITHOUT CLAUDE PRO
No paid Claude? No problem. Copy this into ChatGPT, Gemini, or any free AI and paste a school email underneath:
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.
It was, however, a very cute 11 minutes, despite the hat.
See you soon for some more parental relief.
Sarah xx