This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Erin Kee, the 38-year-old founder of Kee To Wellness and writer of The Mental Load Memo. She also works in tech sales and lives in Austin. It’s been edited for length and clarity.
I have a 3.5-year-old daughter named Claire and 1.5-year-old son named Liam.
We’re in the thick of things right now. We’re transitioning to a new school in the fall, as her old school is closing. It’s summer, so we’re doing swim lessons. My husband just started a new job. There’s a lot of stuff happening in the calendar that needs to be managed.
I didn’t realize that going from one to two kids felt like going from one to four. We had to get a lot more granular on how we were going to be managing our week.
Being able to link that into an AI automation has been really helpful. I’m not trying to spend my whole weekend doing logistics. I actually want to enjoy myself as a working mom.
I feel like every single week I’m finding a new way to use it.
In the beginning, I was messing around with ChatGPT and learning what I could do there. About a year ago, I started leaning more into Claude, which I think has way more functionality with the projects and automations.
One of the things I love the most that I’ve set up is an automated Sunday briefing. Every Sunday morning, it scours all of my calendars: from work, from my personal Gmail, from my wellness email. It gives me a briefing of what I can expect for the week and if anything is overlapping or needs to be rescheduled.
Erin Kee
It gets things I didn’t realize, like a birthday party I need to get a present for. It’ll even read those birthday invites and be like: “This is for a 4-year-old boy, here are some Amazon ideas that would be delivered by that day.”
I also have a family briefing that gets sent to my husband and me. That includes our meal plans for the week. I have it connected to my Skylight recipe box, and it’ll build a grocery list for me.
Why I send Claude multi-minute voice notes
I’m a big voice-noter. My friends and I voice note all day long. It’s helpful when you have something more detailed to say.
I do a long voice note into Claude at least once a day. If I have a lot of feedback, or I have an idea and I need to get it out, I feel like it’s easier than typing.
Most of the time, I’m doing voice-to-text, so I can go in and edit some of the words to make sure everything is correct. I can talk to it for three to five minutes sometimes. It depends on what I’m building.
There was a weird rash on my son. I’ll open Claude up, sometimes add photos, and use voice-to-text. I’ll be at my desk, I’ll be walking around, I’ll be in my car. If it hits my brain, I’m like: “I’ve got to get it out right now.”
Sometimes, my daughter is like, “Who are you talking to?” She’s aware of FaceTime. My mom, stepdad, and brothers all live up in Dallas. I think she thinks if I’m talking into my phone, it’s FaceTime, and she gets to talk to Meemaw.
Sometimes she gets confused, and I have to let her know: “We’re not on FaceTime, no one’s here, I’m just talking to my phone.”
Erin Kee
I’m struggling with getting her to sleep in her room at the moment. We’ve been trying to figure out different ways to get her to sleep up there.
I gave Claude: “She’s starting a new school in August, and we have these different trips coming up.” It said: “It’s summer, she’s going to bed later, so this makes sense. Over the next six weeks leading up to school, here are some ways you can optimize it. Maybe try: ‘You can sleep in our bed during school nights, but on Friday night, you need to sleep in your own bed.'”
I told Claude to research a bunch of parenting experts like Dr. Becky and pull in tips on what people are doing in similar situations. We have a transition plan: “Mom will sleep in your bed one night, Dad will sleep in your bed the next night, and then moving forward, you’re going to sleep in your own bed all the time.”
There’s so much information out there. I don’t think moms need any more information. We don’t need more things on our to-do list. Every time I get on the internet, it’s: I need to be doing this with my kid, I need to be doing gentle parenting, I need to be building resilient children.
We actually need a system. How do we build and optimize a system that is taking things off their plate, and not adding more? That’s what I’m thinking about as I automate.
