🗓️ Practical AI tip of the day: put more context in your calendar invites.
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I love time blocking. Early in my career, a manager suggested it as a time management technique, which began a bit of a weird love story. Sure, it had made a few background appearances on self-help business books, HBR articles, and productivity sub-reddits. But when I started paying attention to it, I was hooked. I'd found solace (and comfort) in being able to structure my day, to anticipate what happens when.
When I talk about time blocking I'm not talking level 0 (block time to prep for a meeting). My threshold for adding a calendar block is most likely much lower than yours. Some days I'm operating on 10-minute increments.
"Freedom in discipline." My life revolves around three calendars:
• Work: outreach, delivery, admin/accounting, content, ...
• Family shared calendar: morning routines (including coffee), meal prep, shuttling kids to activities, who walks the dog, social life, ...
• Self: personal growth, training runs, errands, ...
Before I even began building my personal AI chief of staff*, I connected my calendars and my tools to Claude. But as I iterated through different versions of my personal system, I realized that when I picked up a task or started a new time block I was always looking for context.
The obvious fix to me, but it applies to you too: add more context to your calendar invite. And let AI pick it up.
Now, most of my calendar blocks add some AI-readable appendices. They look like this:
Objective: performance update on feature XXX launch.
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SOP:
Step 1. generate latest progress and dashboards for feature XXX.
Step 2. Pull the week's commits and tickets, update the dashboard, list what slipped.
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Additional info: the spec doc, the ticket, last week's dashboard, ...
The invite carries the when, the who, the what. My AI chief of staff quietly preps everything in the background. I just show up with coffee, ready to go.
Why do I do this? David Allen put it in one line in Getting Things Done: your mind is for having ideas, not holding them. I realized I was carrying a load of "when I get to that block, remember to…" in my head. It took a few extra minutes at the beginning of every task to find my notes, get back in the mindset, pull the context together. Those minutes add up.
evoilabs
It starts with one task.
Everyone wants AI. No one knows where to start. We pick the one task your team repeats every week, build the system that handles it, and show your team how it was built so they can do the next one themselves.
So I put that context directly in the calendar. It's time-bound and doesn't persist, because I just need it for that one task, right then and there.
Try it on the next calendar block you create: write into the description what the AI should look for when the moment arrives.
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My name's Mathieu, and I demystify AI for founders and execs, and help transform their teams from chatting with AI to building systems that compound in value.
