I am a marketer by day, regularly looking for ways to use my work tools for my family life. To be honest, most of them beyond a Google Spreadsheet don't help. Enter, ChatGPT.
If you're not familiar with ChatGPT, it's basically a digital virtual assistant chatbot you can access online for free with an account.
In this blog, I'll explain how this powerful AI tool can be harnessed by moms of young kids to streamline tasks, find inspiration, and make daily life a little more manageable. Yes, ChatGPT is for moms! ChatGPT has become an invaluable ally in making some of my tasks easier and leaving me more time to find joy with my kids.
Meal Planning and Grocery Shopping
I meal plan by adding meals from Pinterest that I have saved to a spreadsheet in my Google Sheets.
I then make the shopping list by copying and pasting the meal list into ChatGPT. The exact prompt I used is:
ChatGPT then gives me a shopping list organized by the grocery department. Viola! I quickly delete the items I know I already have on hand, and have my list.
This might not be available in all areas, but I love to take advantage of free grocery pickup at Whole Foods. I use my list to start adding the items to my cart on Amazon Whole Foods. I schedule my order for pickup, so I can pick up groceries without getting kids out of the car and they bring my groceries out to me. This is a huge time saver.
Bonus! While I like to plan my own meals, ChatGPT is great at meal planning. If I was going to use chatGPT for meal planning, I’d enter the following:
Hi! I am a mom looking for help with meal planning and making grocery lists. I am looking for dinner meals that are made in about 30 minutes. We like to eat tofu, chicken, and ground turkey, with beef or pork on occasion. We love lots of vegetables, and rice, farro, or quinoa for grains. Here are a couple of my favorite meals: link, link, link.
Please give me 10 suggestions for weeknight meals I could make in 30 minutes.
Great! Take this list of meals I have selected and create a shopping list for me. [insert copy and paste list of meal number, name, and links. Formatting doesn't have to be pretty for ChatGPT.]
Hope this helps you save a ton of time, and mental load this week. To save you more time, get my exact meal plans each week for dinners I am making for my family. I'll send them right to your inbox if you join our email list.
Story Time
Part of our bedtime routine is a story that my husband or I make for my preschooler and tell him as he lays in bed to fall asleep. I am running low on story ideas, and am naturally not a gifted storyteller anyway. I use ChatGPT for ideas! I usually read the story in the afternoon to get the gist of it, then recite it my way at bedtime (no phones during story time in our house!).
Here is a prompt I gave ChatGPT this week: Can you create a bedtime story for my 4-year-old son, named Brandt, that has to do with going to Space and teaches a lesson about using our words to tell people what we need?
The story was top-notch and taught a lesson I was working on with my son in a fun way.
Other ideas
You can also ask ChatGPT to:
- Create a chore chart for your x-year-old child
- Help you plan a themed birthday party for your child, including on-theme snacks drinks, and decorations.
- Get you started on a family budget, if you don’t have one yet. For example, give me a sample budget for a family of four earning $100,000 annually and spending $3000 a month on their mortgage. This will give you a starting point to adjust your budget to your life and needs.
- Get some quick tactics on parenting topics. For example, “My 4-year-old is wanting to learn to read. Can you give me a simple activity to try with him?” “How should I start potty training my 19-month old”
- Find book recommendations for your child by age and interest. You can then go check the library website for these books and place them on hold for pickup.
- Create a simple weekly workout schedule given your allotted amount of time, goals, and equipment access.
Hope these ideas save you a ton of time, and mental load this week! To save you more time, get my exact meal plans each week for dinners (tested and approved by my family!). I'll send them right to your inbox if you join our email list.
