We got more than twenty school emails before the first day of school even happened. Somewhere in there was picture day, a half day, and a form I was supposed to sign by Friday.

Kids at school is another job. I gave it to Claude, and this guide is the full setup: every connector, every prompt, every recurring task, step by step. Nothing here assumes you know anything. Each setup is about ten minutes.

Before you start: the prerequisites

Everything below runs on the same short list. Do this part first, once, and every setup after it is a ten minute ask.

1. Claude on your phone. App store, download, sign in. Half of this job arrives as a flyer in a backpack, and the phone app is the camera.

2. Claude on your computer. Download the desktop app at claude.ai/download, Mac or Windows. This matters because the desktop app is where Cowork lives, and Cowork is where the dashboard and every recurring task in this guide get built. You will see it in the sidebar next to your chats.

3. The right plan. The $20 a month Pro plan usually suffices for all of this, and the recurring tasks are what the extra usage is for. One note for Outlook families: reading Outlook email and calendar takes the Microsoft 365 connector, which needs the paid plan. Google families can start on free and upgrade when they feel the ceiling.

4. Connect email and calendar. In Claude, open Settings, then Connectors. Connect Google and allow Gmail and Google Calendar, or connect Microsoft 365 for Outlook. Once Claude can read the school emails and write to the calendar, everything else is just asking.

5. Optional, for the shopping one: the Claude extension in Chrome on your computer. That is what lets it fill a cart for you.

Remember: connect once, benefit all year. Every setup below assumes this list is done.

1. The kids' dashboard

One page that answers tomorrow before you have to think about it: what each kid wears, brings, where pickup is depending on the enrichment activity, and which folders travel. Mine refreshes every night.

Where this happens: Cowork, in the desktop app. The dashboard is a live artifact, a real page that Claude builds and then keeps updating, and Cowork is where live artifacts live. Here is the exact path.

Step 1. Open the desktop app and click Cowork in the sidebar. Start a new session and paste the prompt below. The page opens in the side panel like a little app, one section per kid, a pickup line, a folders line.

Build me an artifact called "Kids: Tomorrow." One section per kid: what to wear, what to bring, and any folder or form that travels tomorrow. Below that, one pickup line telling me where each kid gets picked up and when, based on that day's activities. Keep it short. Only show what is different from a normal day.
Cowork Chats Projects Scheduled Tasks Connectors Kids: Tomorrow Live · updates nightly luna wear: spirit-day pink bring: swim bag olive wear: jacket, 58 degrees bring: library book pick up: luna, main pavilion 3:30 (lego camp) · olive, gate 3 at 3:00 folders: monday folder signed and back in the backpack
The dashboard is a live artifact in a Cowork session. It looks like this, and it refreshes itself every night.

Step 2. Make it refresh itself. Still in Cowork, open Scheduled Tasks in the sidebar and click New task. Paste the prompt below, set it to run every evening, and save. From then on it re-reads the school emails, the calendar, and the weather, and the page is current before bedtime without you touching it.

Every night at 7:30pm, read the latest school emails, the family calendar, and tomorrow's weather, and update the "Kids: Tomorrow" artifact. If something urgent needs me tonight, message me about it.

Step 3. Put the whole thing in one Claude project called School, so every chat about the kids lands with the same context. And keep the artifact somewhere you will actually look. Mine sits open next to my email.

Remember: the dashboard is an artifact, which means it is a page you can open every night, not a chat you have to scroll.

2. Every date lands on the calendar

Two ways in, same result. Both need the calendar connection from the setup above.

The flyer way: open the Claude app, take a picture of the flyer, and say "put every date on this on my family calendar, tagged with which kid it belongs to." Done at pickup, standing in the parking lot.

The email way, set up once in Cowork: this is the one that ends the "wait, when is picture day" era, so do it slowly one time. In the desktop app: open Cowork, click Scheduled Tasks, click New task. Paste the prompt below. Set the schedule to every day at 5pm. Save. That is the entire setup, a prompt plus a time.

And make it about the kids, not just the school. The dance studio emails dates. The swim coach emails dates. Birthday party invites email dates. One daily sweep catches all of it.

Every day, check my email for anything with a date that involves the kids: school, dance, swim, sports, camps, birthday parties, anything. Put every event, deadline, half day, and no-school day on my family calendar, tagged per kid, with real times and pick-up locations spelled out. If something repeats weekly, make it a recurring calendar event. When you finish, message me a short list of what you added and flag anything that looked ambiguous instead of guessing.

Notice the schedule lives on the task, not in the prompt. You are not asking Claude to remember to check every day, you are telling Cowork to run it every day. That difference is why it never gets forgotten.

Cowork Chats Projects Scheduled Tasks Connectors Scheduled Tasks + New task Kid events to calendar Every day, 5:00 PM Kids: Tomorrow refresh Every night, 7:30 PM School email digest Sundays, 6:00 PM
The drawer where the whole system lives: Cowork, then Scheduled Tasks. Each one is a prompt plus a time.

Two more recurring tasks worth stealing, same click path, different prompt:

Every weekday at noon, check the school emails for anything with a form or a deadline. If a deadline is within three days and I have not handled it, message me with the deadline, what it needs, and a draft of anything that has to be written or filled out.
On the first of each month, read the school calendars and my family calendar and message me the month ahead: no-school days, half days with the real pickup times, spirit days and dress-up days, and anything where I need to arrange childcare.
Remember: a scheduled task in Cowork is just a prompt plus a time. If you can ask it once, you can schedule it forever.

One more option, for when the laptop stays closed: you can also set this up as a routine in Claude Code. I know that sounds technical. It is not, it is the same sentence typed in a different window. The difference is where the work happens. Cowork tasks tend to run locally, on your computer, so your machine does the sweeping. A Claude Code routine runs on a schedule in the cloud, so the sweep happens every day whether or not your computer ever opens. Tell it what you want and when, and it builds the routine for you.

Create a routine that runs every day at 5pm: check my email for anything with a date that involves the kids, add every event to my family calendar tagged per kid, and message me what you added.

3. The email pile becomes one Sunday summary

Same drawer, one more task: Cowork, Scheduled Tasks, New task, set to Sunday evening. This one replaces reading the stream with a digest. Mine arrives Sunday night with three sections: what I still need to do (medical forms, the enrichment signup), what to be aware of (parent teacher night, the random no-school day), and what it skipped because I already handled it.

Every Sunday evening, read all emails from both schools from the past week. Send me one summary with three sections: STILL TO DO (forms, signups, tuition, deadlines, things like labeling water bottles), BE AWARE (dates and changes, like parent teacher night or no-school days), and SKIPPED (things that need no action, one line each). Keep it under 200 words.

This pairs with the morning briefing routine if you want it folded into a daily brief instead.

4. The school shopping, start to cart

Step 1. Snap the supply list in the app. Tell Claude what is already in the closet so you do not double-buy glue sticks.

Step 2. Ask for picks, not links. Claude reads the reviews for you and comes back with one or two options depending on what you are going for. When Olive needed a jacket, it gave me the one that plays hard and washes easy, and the one that lasts two winters. I picked in ten seconds.

Step 3. On your computer, with the Chrome extension installed, ask Claude to add the picks to your cart. It fills the cart and stops.

Hot tip, if you are shopping away from Amazon and Walmart this year: connect the Shop connector. It plugs Claude into the world of Shopify stores, with real intel on what those shops carry, so when you ask for jacket picks it can pull options from the small brands too, not just the big-box results.
Remember: Claude fills the cart, you press buy. That is the rule in my house for anything involving money.

5. Study guides, made visual

Go to Claude Design, upload a photo of the homework or just name the topic, and ask for the format your kid actually responds to: flashcards, letter tracing sheets, a book quiz, a poster for the fridge.

Here is a photo of my kid's homework. Make: a set of 10 flashcards practicing the same skill, a one-page visual guide I can print for the fridge, and a short quiz to do together at dinner. Age-appropriate for a [age] year old.

My girls are little, so ours are tracing sheets and a solar system poster. Older kids get the state capitals and the vocab quiz. Same ten minutes.

What to notice across all five:

  • Connect once, ask forever. The ten minutes of connector setup is what makes every other ask a one-liner.
  • Give every ask a time. Scheduled Tasks in Cowork is the drawer where all of these live. If it worked once, schedule it, and a trick becomes a system.
  • Dashboards beat chats. An artifact you open beats an answer you scroll for.
  • You stay the button-presser. It drafts, lists, and fills carts. You approve, sign, and buy.
The school year did not get simpler. I just stopped being the only computer in the house that was running it.

Start with the connectors tonight, then build the dashboard first. If you want the bigger version, where the kids' page is one tab of a dashboard that runs everything, that is the life dashboard build.