Your AI as a personal assistant

A skill is a text file with instructions for your AI. This one is called Robin, like me, but it’s Batman’s Robin: the sidekick who does the legwork. You’re Batman.

Robin works in the apps you’ve connected to your AI. It ticks off tasks, books appointments and gets emails ready for you. It keeps things short and practical, with the odd dry joke about Gotham. When something is serious, the jokes stop.

What it keeps track of

Each app has one job. Your to-do list holds what needs doing, your calendar holds when things happen, and your inbox holds what comes in. Robin never adds a task to your calendar as a separate event, because a task with a due date already shows up there.

Before it books anything, Robin checks that you’re free. It only sends an email when you tell it to; otherwise it saves a draft. Ask it to go through your inbox and it turns the action points into tasks.

Keeping in touch from the day you actually spoke

For people you want to talk to regularly, you create a recurring task, such as ‘Sarah (every 2 weeks)’. Say ‘I spoke to Sarah today’ and Robin finds that task and counts the two weeks from today. If Sarah was due on 30 September and you spoke to her on 23 September, the next reminder becomes 7 October.

Google Tasks normally counts a repeat from the old date. Robin does it the way Kade does: the clock starts again on the day you actually spoke.

How full your week is

Robin scores your week in points. An hour in your calendar is 1 point, a task is a quarter of a point. Working hours and calendar items that are only there for information don’t count.

Under 27 points your week is green, from 27 to 33 it’s orange, and from 33 it’s red. Ask for ‘two hours with Harvey on Thursday afternoon’ and Robin checks your calendar, books the slot and gives you your new total straight away. If that tips the week into orange or red, it asks what can go. You decide.

You set the limits yourself. Start with these, use Robin for two weeks, and after a week that felt far too busy, ask how many points it had. Then set red at 85 to 90 per cent of that.

The weekly review

On Sunday evening, type weekly review. Robin asks you three questions, one at a time:

1. Did you get enough rest? A score from 1 to 5, and what gave you energy or drained it.
2. Did you do enough for yourself? Also from 1 to 5.
3. What do you want to do less of next week?

Then it works out the points for the week just gone and the week ahead. It looks for packed days and double bookings, and counts your free evenings: evenings with nothing planned between 19:00 and 23:00. By default you want at least three out of seven.

Finally it suggests what could be dropped or moved, and where you could block out time to rest. Nothing changes without your say-so. It keeps your scores and points in the task ‘Start Weekly Review’, so it can compare your weeks with each other.

Setting it up

The skill is written for Google Tasks, Google Calendar and Gmail, which makes Gemini the most natural fit. Claude and ChatGPT can work with it too once you connect those apps.

1. Download SKILL.md from GitHub.
2. Fill in your own details where there are square brackets, such as [USER_NAME] and [PRIMARY_EMAIL]. Or leave it to your AI and say the first time: ‘Ask me the onboarding questions to personalize this skill.’
3. Add it to your AI. In Gemini, make it a skill or put it in your saved info, and turn on the Google Workspace extension. In Claude, create a project, connect your calendar, tasks and email, and paste the skill into the project instructions. In ChatGPT, create a custom GPT connected to those apps and paste the skill into its instructions.
4. Using Todoist, Notion or Outlook? Paste the skill into your AI and ask it to rewrite the skill for your apps. There’s a ready-made prompt for that in the README.