Duct Tape and AI: Creative Solutions for Daily Friction
Gmail does a great job of automatically adding calendar events that arrive in structured formats, like meeting invites or flight confirmations.
But there's plenty of stuff I need to manage that doesn't show up automatically—this might be a school schedule or sports practice for the kids. We're not quite to the point where AI agents can just take care of this automatically (although AI email services like Superhuman or Cora might be getting close). I figured out a quick way to use AI to accelerate the process.
Take a screenshot of an email with the date, time, and additional details.
Share the screenshot with ChatGPT using the share function.
Ask ChatGPT to create a Google Calendar link based on the screenshot.
It will create an event with much more detail about the activity than I would have added myself, and it's just one click to add it to my calendar.
Here's what the link looks like if you're curious:https://calendar.google.com/calendar/render?action=TEMPLATE&text=Away+Game+at+Corte+Madera+Bach&dates=20251025T170000Z/20251025T183000Z&details=5/6B4+-+Tewksbury+game+at+Corte+Madera+Town+Park+-+Field+G+(498+Tamalpais+Dr,+Corte+Madera,+CA+94925).+Uniform:+White.&location=498+Tamalpais+Dr,+Corte+Madera,+CA+94925
And here's the event in Gmail:
To make this a little easier, you don't want to retype the prompt every time, so you can use Text Replacement, which is found under Settings > Keyboard. Now I just have to type `pDate` and it expands into the full prompt.
Sometimes you will need to create multiple events at once. Instead of asking for a Google Calendar link, you can ask ChatGPT to create a CSV that you can import into Google Calendar. This is great for quickly importing the school year calendar, for example.
This is a great example of AI accelerating things that we're already doing, but in ways that require a little bit of knowledge and creativity. It's not full agentic automation, but it will save a bit of time with every new event.
My goal isn't To create a how‑to for a specific workflow, although hopefully this is valuable for now.
What I'm really trying to do is create a shift in mindset: every time you are doing something and there's a little bit of friction—a little bit of manual clicking, copying, pasting, whatever—think creatively. How can you connect your tools together? How can you get AI involved to simplify that, streamline it, or hopefully automate it.