We tested ChatGPT‘s latest model, GPT-5.2 to see how well it handles both daily and weekly planning, and we found that it’s great for some cases, and really, really bad for others.
In this article, we’ll go over how you can use ChatGPT for your daily planning, its limitations, and how you can work around them. We’ll also include prompts you can paste directly into ChatGPT to help structure your plans.
⚡TL;DR
- ChatGPT excels at turning natural language into simple daily plans
- It’s not great at handling the large numbers of hard constraints typical in weekly planning
- For more accurate planning and automatic rescheduling, tools like FlowSavvy can help
Why use ChatGPT to plan your day?
It makes sense why people turn to LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, etc. to plan their schedule. LLMs are really good at transforming your free-form text into structured data, making them a great way to generate a daily schedule. Just brain dump everything you have to do in one big message, hit send, and let ChatGPT magically create your plan for the day.
On top of that, ChatGPT can help with your daily planning in a few other ways:
- Duration Estimation: It provides reasonable estimates for task durations.
- Task Breakdown: It can help break larger tasks down into manageable parts, like the popular Goblin Tools app.
- Creativity: ChatGPT can add extra details like locations and helpful notes
How to plan your day with ChatGPT
1. Start with your base prompt
ChatGPT needs to know some basic information about your schedule in order to make a realistic plan. Copy and paste the following prompt into ChatGPT and fill in the blanks:
Create a schedule for me in table format with the times in the first column and the task title in the second column. Use the following constraints:
– Start tasks at ______
– End tasks at ______
– Include time for breakfast, lunch, and dinner
– Include time for breaks
Plan the following tasks into my day:
[tasks here]
If you already have a calendar with events in it, include a screenshot or picture of your calendar so ChatGPT knows to schedule your tasks around your other events.
💡Pro tip: Create a GPT that includes these base instructions if you want to reuse this prompt every day. That way, you can just open your GPT and enter the tasks for the day. Pasting in this prompt every day also works just as well if you prefer to keep things simple.
2. List out your tasks
While you can just spew tasks in one big paragraph, we recommend using a bulleted list with one task on each line. This allows you to add as much context as needed for each task without any ambiguity. We’ll use hyphens, since ChatGPT doesn’t support bulleted lists in prompts. Here’s what that might look like:
– Read 30m any time
– Organize desk 30m sometime in the morning
– Answer emails 30m
– Design website 4h. Don’t schedule all of this at once.
– Client outreach 1h
Here’s an example of the schedule ChatGPT generated from that prompt:
3. Ask ChatGPT to make any adjustments.
If you don’t like the first draft ChatGPT suggests, you can ask it to make adjustments, like switching the order of tasks, increasing break times, or breaking down big tasks into more manageable subtasks.
💡Pro tip: Use Canvas mode so you can manually edit your plan directly in ChatGPT. Click the “+” before sending your first message, hover over “More”, then choose “Canvas”.
4. Export your plan.
If you have to open ChatGPT to look at your plan, you likely won’t follow it, so save the plan somewhere accessible. You can either take a screenshot and print it out, copy it into your favorite notes app, or export it to your calendar app. Here’s how to do that 👇
Export your schedule from ChatGPT to Google Calendar or Outlook Calendar
- Ask ChatGPT to generate an .ics file for your plan.
- Sometimes, ChatGPT will generate a file you can click to download, but if it just gives you the raw code, open Notepad (Windows) or TextEdit (macOS) and copy the code ChatGPT created into the text editor. Save the file as “day-plan.ics”
- Import the file into Google Calendar or Outlook calendar. For Google Calendar on web, go to Settings > Import & Export. For Outlook on web, click “Add calendar” in the left sidebar, then “Upload from file”. Select which calendar you want the events to be added to.
Keep in mind that if you change your plan with ChatGPT and want to import it into your calendar again, you’ll need to delete the events from the first plan first, since importing the new .ics file will just add the new events on top of the old ones.
If you want your tasks to reschedule automatically, use a tool like FlowSavvy instead so you don’t have to keep exporting your updated schedule from ChatGPT. FlowSavvy is an AI scheduling assistant that will create your schedule for you and then automatically reschedule when you miss a task or a new meeting interrupts your plan. It syncs with Google, Outlook, and iCloud calendars, so it will automatically keep your schedule updated.
Limitations of daily planning with ChatGPT
Simple daily planning like the examples shared above generally works pretty well in ChatGPT, but it can quickly fall apart when you start adding more constraints and context, like when planning a full week. For example, we tested GPT 5.2 by giving it a sample week with just 3 pre-existing events, and then we gave it 7 tasks to fit into the week:
You can see that by Tuesday, it had already made 3 mistakes:
- Splitting “Project 1” when we asked it to find an uninterrupted 3 hours
- “Check emails” for 1 hour on Tuesday when we said “30m”.
- Scheduled only 4 hours of “Fix bug” before the deadline when we said it would take 5 hours.
If you’re using ChatGPT for simple daily planning, little inconsistencies like this may not be a big deal, but if you’re a professional with a complex schedule, you might end up spending even more time fixing the schedule.
To prevent this, you can use FlowSavvy to automatically plan your schedule and reschedule when plans change. FlowSavvy uses a dedicated scheduling engine to plan your schedule, so it doesn’t hallucinate like ChatGPT. It also reschedules when plans change, so you can get back on track quickly.
Final thoughts: Should you use ChatGPT for daily planning?
ChatGPT is a great way to transform abstract thoughts into a concrete plan for your day. You can just tell it what you need to do it natural language, and it will create a schedule.
Use ChatGPT when you need a quick, simple schedule for the day. For more complex schedules and automatic rescheduling, use FlowSavvy to schedule your entire day, week, or even month.