There is a job in every household that nobody applied for. It involves remembering that the car registration is due, that the school wants a form back by Thursday, that the insurer has quietly raised the premium, and that three people need to be in three places on Saturday morning. It pays nothing. It is never finished. And in most homes it lands on whoever is worst at ignoring it.

I have an executive assistant for my working life, built on Claude, which I describe here. The more interesting discovery was how much of the same machinery applies at home.

What it takes off you

A personal assistant’s repetitive work looks like this:

  • Reading everything that arrives and pulling out the three things with a date or an amount on them.
  • Keeping one calendar true when the information comes from five directions: school emails, club newsletters, a partner’s work trip, a dentist’s text message.
  • Remembering renewals and, more usefully, noticing when a renewal has gone up and drafting the email that asks why.
  • Planning the fiddly things: a trip with connections, a birthday with eleven children, a week when both parents travel.
  • Filing, so that the warranty, the receipt and the policy number can be found in under a minute, two years from now.

I would say three-quarters of life admin is that: reading, extracting, reminding, drafting, filing. None of it needs your judgement. All of it needs your attention, which is the scarcer thing.

How to set one up

You need a paid Claude plan with your personal mail, calendar and drive connected, and training on your data switched off. Then three habits.

A weekly sweep. Once a week, ask it to read the last seven days of mail and tell you what has a date, what has an amount, and what needs a reply. Have it propose calendar entries and let you approve them. Ten minutes on a Sunday evening replaces a low hum of worry all week.

A renewals list. Ask it to find every recurring charge and renewal it can see in your mail and build a simple list with dates. Review it once. Then ask each month what is coming up and whether anything has changed price.

A household file. One folder, one naming pattern, and an instruction to file things as they arrive and to be able to find them again. This alone is worth the subscription the first time you need a receipt for a warranty claim.

What to keep

Anything it sends is a draft until you approve it. It does not pay, book or cancel on its own. And I would keep it out of anything involving your children’s personal details beyond what a task genuinely needs: a date and a place, yes; a medical form, do it yourself.

There is also a gentler point. Some of this work is how a family stays in touch with its own life. I do not want a machine to choose the birthday present. I want it to remember the birthday, book the venue and chase the replies, so that choosing the present is the only part left, and I have the headspace to enjoy it.

The reason to bother

It is not the time, though you will get hours back. It is that the background process in your head, the one that is always half-remembering something, finally gets to stop. If that sounds appealing and you would like a hand setting it up properly, send me a note with what your household runs on. An hour is usually enough.