Can it handle time?

🚴 The quest for a perfect weekend schedule

Can GPT-4 help me plan the weekend? Let's give it a try!

The constraints

I started by listing the constraints:

• 🔥 tomorrow will be a hot day with the high of 35 Celsius, my apartment doesn't have AC

• 🏖️ tomorrow is Saturday, I don't work

• 🛋️ I have a house guest staying at my place tonight, they'll likely wake up and depart around 9 AM

• 🚴‍♀️ I have a bike trip on Sunday and I haven't used my bike for over a year. Need to inflate the tires and go on a little test ride to see if it works. If it doesn't I may need to visit some maintenance shop on short notice

• 📝 I publish a weekly newsletter about AI every Sunday, I need to write the next post and I don't have a good topic yet. So may need at least 4 hours of focused work for this

• 🎞️ If I don't make any other plans last minute and I still have energy, I may want to see the movie "Virgin Suicides" playing at 10:30 PM at "Filmothèque du Quartier Latin"

• 🏃 I may want to go for a quick run of about 1 hour, preferably early in the day when it's not yet too hot

• 😋 I'd like to eat lunch in some local restaurant around 1PM

The conversation

For appropriately futuristic experience, I didn’t want to give all those constraints to the model at once, but instead have what would resemble a conversation with a human-like assistant. So starting with this prompt:

Help me organize my plan for tomorrow. I will be telling you about all the different things I may want or need to do, and at the end I will ask you to summarize and propose a plan

I then gave each piece of context to GPT-4 in a separate message. This works surprisingly well, GPT-4 offers brief but relevant comments acknowledging how it incorporates each constraints into its planning:

Once I get to the 8th constraint of “Lunch at 1PM”, the model stops waiting for further instructions and decides to produce a plan. Maybe it figured that you can only fit so much in a day.

The plan

The results from GPT-4 are unsettingly good. The plan is not only coherent (covers the entire day, nothing gets double booked) and meets all the constraints, it also includes all sorts of nice touches that a good human planner could think of.

In the first part of the day, it sensibly suggests to spend some time with the house guest before they depart. It then allocates 30 minutes to reset or clean my living space… I did need that time but didn’t think of it when listing the constraints!

In the afternoon, it sets up time to pick up the bike after maintenance, in case maintenance was needed:

The evening is appropriately relaxing and empty, with the optional movie (“if energy levels permit”).

Postcard from Médoc

The wine marathon in Médoc was a lot of fun! The uphill stretch around kilometer 35 pictured above was a challenge, especially after sampling a few too many of the Bordeaux wines served along the way 😅.

Have a great week 💫,
– Przemek