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There are still several weekends left between now and Labor Day. An AI assistant helped me figure out what to do with all of this stuff.
Photo by Dennis Fisher/Getty Images
July is almost over and the familiar reckoning has already begun: the concerts you’ve been meaning to go to, the outdoor dinners that were never scheduled, the weekend trips that stayed in the planning stage and went nowhere. Summer has a way of being faster than any other season, while also somehow feeling like it should last longer. With about six weeks to go between now and Labor Day, I decided to stop letting that happen to me and handed the remaining schedule over to the AI assistant instead. Here’s the full calendar I created and how I plan to use it.
This year, I decided to shortcut this pattern by doing something I probably should have tried earlier: handing my summer calendar to an AI assistant and asking it to fill it all out before I had a chance to procrastinate my way through it.
It’s time to start thinking about how to prepare for summer. Here’s how to use AI, no matter your age or life stage.
Make it count
The limited nature of summer is what makes it so special. Those long days and hot summer nights don’t last forever, and you have precious little time to squeeze in a big pot of barbecue, shake your booty, and mess around in and/or around boats and large bodies of cold water.
I used to Claude I To create a plan for the summer that makes the most of my time, right down to a daily routine that will leave me in better shape physically and mentally.
Claude created an interactive calendar filled with exact dates to the hour, designed to track my summer glow and get-togethers, with concert, beach, and restaurant recommendations.
For fitness-related goals, weekly runs, bike rides, HIIT sessions, hiking and weight training sessions are scheduled (you can be more specific in your prompting if you prefer different workouts), as well as fun summer-related activities like beach days, Taco Tuesday (scheduled for Wednesday), and visits to bars and museums. She even set aside time blocks for reading only.
Summer reading hacks
Reading during the summer can be either a relaxing activity at the beach or a fiery challenge of boredom, handed out by a teacher bored with the material. Artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT It can create reading schedules that make your learning goals more manageable and potentially fun.
I used ChatGPT to turn a summer reading list from a high school in Los Angeles (Eagle Rock High, you know!) into a schedule that gives the student plenty of time to complete each suggested text on the long summer reading list, plus a collection of inspiring sites to read.
Be warned: ChatGPT offered to create a “beautiful printable summer reading map of Los Angeles” from a table and list, but when I took up the tool at its suggestion, the resulting work wasn’t something I’d stick on the fridge.
What’s worse is that ChatGPT’s response to my criticism of the original ugly map was to give me a second, uglier map and an ad for Vistaprint.
However, Claude AI was up to the task and produced an interactive map with specific locations and dates, as well as in-depth notes on why each location enhances the learning and reading experience of each text.
Summer song
It’s still a mystery whether the pop gods will bless us with any truly irresistible, well-produced new summer anthems this year. The Ying Yang Twins appear to be semi-retired, and mashups and remixes on TikTok are never a sure bet.
AI song making tools Like Suno, which, according to the website, is a “web-based generative audio workstation that combines traditional DAW functions with AI-powered music creation,” and can create songs on the spot with any detail you want.
I tried using Suno to create a summer anthem with lyrics containing my and my wife’s names, but the results were very poor.
The in-browser tool says it can use prompts to generate lyrics, but when I asked Suno to “Use the following names in lyrics: Rachel, Robert,” she created a song that opened with “Use the following names in lyrics: Rachel, Robert,” followed by Almost two minutes of absolute gobbledygook.
However, it has a nice rhythm.
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