Your Weekly Chores, Done in 10 Minutes. 3 Free Prompts Do the Planning. | Edition 364

Every week has the same small jobs that eat your evenings: what’s for dinner, what to buy, and who needs to be where. None of it is hard, but it adds up. A free AI chatbot can take most of the planning off your plate, if you know what to ask.

Here are three chores, a prompt for each that you can copy, and what the free versions of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Microsoft Copilot can and can’t do with them.

1. Meal planning

Deciding what to cook is the chore that never ends. Let AI do the deciding. Give it your real life (who’s eating, what they won’t eat, how much time you have) and it builds the week for you.

Copy this:

Plan 5 weeknight dinners for my household. Before you start, ask me one question at a time: how many people are eating, any allergies or foods we don’t eat, and how much time I have on weeknights. Each meal should use ingredients a regular grocery store carries and reuse leftovers at least once. List the meals by day, with a one-line description of each.

Tip: don’t like a meal? Just reply “swap Wednesday for something with chicken.” You don’t have to start over. (If you’d rather build one great dinner from what’s already in the fridge, that’s what we did in Dinner by AI.)

2. Grocery lists

Once you have a meal plan, the list writes itself. Stay in the same chat so the AI remembers the meals.

Copy this:

Turn the meals you just planned into one grocery list. Combine duplicate items and group everything by store section (produce, dairy, meat, pantry, frozen). Before you finish, ask me what I already have at home, and leave those items off.

Tip: snap a photo of your fridge or pantry shelf and add “leave off anything you can see in this photo.” All four chatbots can look at a picture, but free plans can cap uploads, and ChatGPT’s free limit is only a few a day.

3. Scheduling

Practice, appointments, the dentist, the dog. Getting it all out of your head and into a plan is half the stress.

Copy this:

Help me plan this week. Ask me to list everything my household has going on (appointments, practices, errands, in any order), then make a simple day-by-day schedule, flag anything that overlaps, tell me which days are overloaded, and suggest one thing I could move to make the week easier.

Tip: you don’t have to type neatly. Dump it all in one long, messy sentence. Sorting it out is the AI’s job.

Want the prompts filled in for your household? Set three details below and copy all three.

Which chatbot for which chore?

All four are free to start, and any of them can handle the meal and grocery prompts above. Free plans do have usage limits, so you may hit a cap on a busy day. Where they differ:

• Meal plans and grocery lists: any of the four. Pick the one you already use.
• Remembering your family’s preferences: ChatGPT and Claude can both remember things you tell them across chats, like “no peanuts.” ChatGPT’s free memory is lighter than its paid one.
• Tidying a messy list: any of the four. We like Claude for this, but that’s our taste, not a published feature.
• Putting the schedule on your calendar: if you use Google Calendar, Gemini can create, find and edit events once you turn on its Google Workspace connection, and Google lists no paid plan for it. Claude’s help center says its Google Calendar connection is open to all users, free included, and can create events too. With any of the four, you can also just copy the finished schedule into your calendar yourself.

The short version: if your life runs on Google Calendar, Gemini or Claude can do the scheduling step all the way to the calendar. For everything else, pick whichever chatbot you already have and get comfortable with it. The prompts matter more than the app.

The 10-minute Sunday routine

1. Run the meal planning prompt (3 minutes).
2. Run the grocery list prompt in the same chat (2 minutes).
3. Dump your week into the scheduling prompt (5 minutes).

That’s it. You’ll walk into Monday knowing what’s for dinner, what’s in the cart and where everyone needs to be.

One honest warning

AI is fast but not perfect. It can suggest a recipe with an ingredient your kid is allergic to, or miscount how many eggs you need. If anyone in your house has a food allergy, check every recipe and ingredient label yourself; never rely on the AI for that. Think of it as a helpful assistant, not the boss of your kitchen.

Try it this week

Pick one chore, just one, and try its prompt this Sunday. Hit reply and tell me how it went. I read every response.