Club Benefits
Each week it feels like I'm squeezing more into my calendar. More meetings, more personal and professional projects and constant notifications. May has been a particularly busy month with school activities in the evenings as it wraps up for the summer.
But after feeling increasingly overwhelmed lately, I decided to take my weekly schedule away from Gemini and my Google Calendar and let ChatGPT take over. I asked it to apply the principles from Greg McKeown's book about Essentialis, the bestselling philosophy built around the idea that “less but better” beats constant busyness.
What's interesting is that, although I'm the one who read the book, ChatGPT seemed as though it had read it, too. Because of the AI's understanding of the book and its concepts, it was able to break down the essentials to help me identify the major time vampires in my life.
ChatGPT showed me something I hadn't noticed
Here’s the exact prompt I used: “Analyze my weekly schedule through the lens of Essentialism by Greg McKeown. Identify the biggest areas of wasted energy, unnecessary obligations, context switching or low-value tasks. Then suggest ways to simplify my week, protect deep work and eliminate things that don’t meaningfully contribute to my goals or wellbeing.”
Then I took a screenshot of my professional and personal calendars filled with work blocks, errands, kid logistics, email time, meetings, workouts, household tasks and all and uploaded into the chatbox.
Immediately it gave me so many insights like that my week is meeting-heavy in the middle of prime cognitive hours and that I was paying a hidden “attention tax” by squeezing focus times into small gaps.
Here's what I learned:
- Time drain #1: Constant context switching. This was the first thing ChatGPT flagged and honestly, it nailed it. Although my schedule looked “organized” on paper, the AI pointed out that I was constantly bouncing between completely different types of tasks (meetings, focus time, demos, etc.) all day long.
- Time drain #2: Invisible decision fatigue. This one genuinely caught me off guard, too. ChatGPT noticed that many of my recurring weekly tasks required small but constant decisions like what to prioritize, when to check my email (guilty of going all day without responding), what needed immediate attention, and when to fit in workouts (early morning or evening?)
- Time drain #3: Treating everything like it’s urgent. This was probably the most uncomfortable observation. ChatGPT noticed my schedule had almost no distinction between what's truly important and what are my emotional obligations.
The AI highlighted that everything was being treated with roughly the same level of urgency. I hadn't thought about that until ChatGPT referenced one of the core ideas behind Essentialism: if you don’t prioritize your life, someone else will. Ouch.
It also pointed out that I was frequently sacrificing meaningful long-term work because smaller, noisier tasks kept interrupting my attention. Honestly, tasks that AI could do like clearing my inbox, taking care of deep research or scheduling tasks.
From there, ChatGPT suggested creating "non-reactive" work blocks, notification-free creative windows, a delayed-response rule for nonessential messages and stricter boundaries around availability. Basically, fewer inputs. More intentional output.
Why this worked so well
I'm a sucker for self-help and business books. I often use Audible in Claude to find my next read, but reading the books and actually putting the knowledge into action are two very different things.
I could have asked ChatGPT for generic productivity advice, but shaping it through the lens of "Essentialism" and personalizing it to me, made all the different. I was able to grasp the concepts since I had already read about it. By using AI to spot patterns that were difficult for me to see inside my own routine, I got a better picture of what I needed to change.
AI is surprisingly good at zooming out and identifying attention fragmentation, emotional overload, repetitive bottlenecks and hidden inefficiencies.
And, when paired with the Essentialism framework, the results turned into real productivity hacks.
Give this a try yourself
This technique is worth trying with the exact prompt above or tweaking with a simpler version like: “Apply Essentialism principles to my weekly calendar.” The AI will identify parts of your schedule that are creating the most unnecessary stress, help you decide which tasks are high effort but low value and what you're wasting metnal energy on the most.
You might be surprised by what the AI notices immediately. ChatGPT helped me realize how much unnecessary noise I’d normalized. And the biggest takeaway from applying this prompt was that although I had pretty good time management skills, I needed fewere competing priorities.
Give it a try and let me know in the comments what you think. You might just discover an unexpected AI productivity lesson.
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