I’ll be the first to tell you, I love AI. I use it almost every day to support my work and personal life. But when it comes to planning your time, it is important to know where AI fits and where it doesn't.

After diving deep into several popular AI planning platforms, I am sharing the five major pitfalls I uncovered. These challenges are especially important to understand if you are balancing work, family, caregiving, and the realities of daily life. In this episode, you will hear why AI planning tools can actually create more overwhelm and where AI can truly support your planning in a helpful way.

In This Episode, We’ll Cover:

• Why your digital calendar will never be "smart enough" to run your life
• How AI planning tools make decisions without understanding what actually matters
• The danger of letting a tool prioritize your time without your input
• Why unpredictability and real-life pivots break AI’s logic
• The one way I do recommend using AI to support your planning

Listen to the episode here!

Or watch the episode here!

I’d be honored and grateful if you would head over to iTunes to leave a review and let other female entrepreneurs know what you learned! While you’re there, don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast so you don’t miss an episode.

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

[00:00:00] After a recent in-depth experiment with AI planning tools, I do not recommend them. And today I'm gonna be covering the top five pitfalls I found with AI planning tools. 

[00:00:18] All right, friends. Welcome back to the Work Life Harmony podcast today. I'm super excited about this conversation. Actually more information that I wanna share with you regarding AI planning tools my experiment with them, and more importantly, to actually share with you where I do believe AI fits in terms of planning. 

[00:00:35] Now, before we jump in. If you have anyone in your life that is, you know, really taking a deep dive into AI that has been maybe talking about trying out some of these AI planning tools, please share this episode with them because I would love to give them this knowledge, this education before they. 

[00:00:56] Dive in. Now, before I talk about my experience here with AI planning tools, I think it would make a lot of sense to just kind of take a step back and maybe share with you what these tools are what they're advertising, all of that. Now, when, when we talk about ai, there's lots of things that that could cover. 

[00:01:19] I am talking today specifically around there are pieces of software. There are new software companies that are advertising and selling tools that will essentially take over your digital calendar, like a, a Google Calendar. I'm just going to use the, the term Google Calendar here, but please interchange I cal, and in some cases even Outlook. 

[00:01:42] All right? But if you are using a true piece of software for calendaring, they essentially. Kind of take over for you, your calendar and build out your plan for the week with creating actual blocks of time on your calendar. Alright? So if you are going to use an AI planning tool, you actually give it access to your calendar and then. 

[00:02:09] You are the one feeding it, the input of here's everything that I need to get done for the week or for the month, and then this tool is building your plan for you based on the data that you give it. All right? So I've had some people reaching out to me going, Hey, can I just use one of these tools? 

[00:02:31] Instead of taking the top program and learning your planning system. 'cause if the output is creating a realistic plan, could I plug these AI tools into there? Now I've already, you know, spoiler alert, I've already shared the fact that I'm not recommending them. But here's what I want you to understand. 

[00:02:47] Before we jump into these five pitfalls, I do want you to stick around to the end of this episode because I am gonna be sharing. How I use AI to support my planning. All right. I think it's important for you to understand I'm not here bashing AI as a whole. I think it's incredible. I think it provides a ton of value and when used the right way is unbelievably helpful. 

[00:03:11] So I am coming at this angle from someone. Who uses AI pretty much every single day. But I think it's important for you to have this knowledge of how these planning tools work and, and most importantly, what are the, the pitfalls here. So if you were to when I talk about these. The particular AI planning tools, there's two big ones that you, you may have seen ads for, and now that you're listening to this podcast, you'll probably see ads for them. 

[00:03:38] Motion with an M is one of the bigger ones along with reclaim.ai. Now there's a lot of other ones out there, but those are kind of the two big names in this space. I have had a number of AI planning software companies reach out to me asking me, essentially to be an affiliate or a partner for them to help. 

[00:03:58] Promote their platform. And finally enough of these requests came in. I was like, okay, Megan, I need to like, I need to get in here and see what's going on in this space. Now, here's what these tools claim to do, They basically say, give me access to your calendar where you already have appointments, so you're gonna give them access to it. 

[00:04:20] And then they say, all you need to do as the user is show up and brain dump all of your to-dos, right? Whether it's for work, whether it's for family, whether it's for business, whatever it is. And then you're going to tell it your priorities and then it's gonna build out the best calendar for you. for example, if you were like, okay, I need three hours to get this report done and I need to be at school at three 30 for pickup. 

[00:04:47] They're like, great, got it. Let me, let me create a plan for you. Then they also advertise that, Hey, I. If something shifts like, you know, maybe now it's a early release school day and you have to pick up at one 30, they'll be like, no worries. I will replan and reschedule for you. Sounds pretty awesome, doesn't it? 

[00:05:07] It's like, oh my gosh. Finally a tool. I can just feed it all the information about my life. And then. It will just tell me how to execute it. Well, here's what happens when we actually dive in and start using these tools, and I am here to tell you, when I, when I really went all in on it, I, I gave it the. 

[00:05:28] Best I could give it. Like the data I was giving, it was fantastic. All right. I did not go in with the intent of, let me figure out why these don't work. I went in this and guys, I was in software for over 20 years. I know what I'm doing when I'm testing out new software. I went in this with two frames of mind. 

[00:05:48] Number one, how do I make it do what I wanna do? Right? So I actually. Created using my 10 step planning framework. I created a weekly plan, the re, the actual one for an upcoming week. I then took all of my planning inputs and fed it into, and I'm not gonna name I, I played with three different tools. 

[00:06:08] All right? So I found the same thing across all of them. So I fed in the same information to them to say, okay, can I get this thing to build out? What I manually did. So I really tried to make it work, and the answer was no, I could not. So now, because I couldn't get it to work, I then shifted gears again from over 20 years of testing software to say, okay, where's the breakdown? 

[00:06:31] why isn't this working? All right, so let's cover the five pitfalls. I discovered time and time again with these planning tools. So pitfall number one, which is one of the easier ones to, to kind of set up, but it takes a lot of time. Pitfall number one is that these tools are always going to assume that your digital calendar, again, I'm just gonna say Google Calendar, that your Google calendar is 100% complete and accurate, meaning if you are missing commitments in there. 

[00:07:06] Then it's, it's gonna schedule right on over them. So let me give you an example. If you don't plug into your Google calendar, we eat dinner from 6:00 PM to 7:00 PM Your planning tool is gonna schedule tasks for you. It might be like, Hey, from, you know, at six 30 you're gonna go to. Pick up your dry cleaning or you know you're gonna be working on this task. 

[00:07:29] Alright? So keep in mind, any open space on your Google calendar, your planning tools are gonna be like, that's mine. I'm taking control of it and I'm gonna plug in what they should be doing. Now this also means, let's say you schedule your six month dental cleaning. Like my dentist sends me a, you know, a, an appointment that shows up on my Google calendar. 

[00:07:51] Well, if my dental cleaning is at one o'clock, my appointment on my calendar is gonna say one to 1 45 dentist. I have to proactively know to go into my Google calendar and block off the time before it to drive there and block off the time after it. Otherwise, this planning tool is gonna come, shove something in ending right a minute before I'm supposed to be at the dentist. 

[00:08:13] Alright, so you have to be super accurate with your, with your Google calendar when you're plugging this in. Okay? Again. Totally fixable, but not the way most people work. Now, number two, and this is interesting because we've been talking a lot about prioritization lately. You have to have realistic priorities, all right? 

[00:08:40] With these tools, when you feed in, here's all the things competing for my time. You tell the planning tool what the priorities are. Like, you know, this is a, these are all top, you know, this kind of, they all do it differently, but one of them just had them labeling like one to five. Is it a one, a two or three, four or five, one being the most important, anything labeled a one. 

[00:09:02] It is going to cram it into your calendar with no breaks. Period. Meaning it could create a day for you where you literally never have a five minute break. Now there's a pro to this, right? You really need to be thoughtful with your priorities. So most people and these tools are not teaching you how to prioritize. 

[00:09:22] So if you're someone who's struggling with, well, no, I, I really do think I have like, this is a list for the day. Tell me how to get it all done. It's gonna go alright. Buckle up buttercup. You better get up at 4:00 AM and you're gonna be going till 11:00 PM. Right. So if you don't have a good handle on prioritization techniques and strategies, this thing is gonna overbook you big time. 

[00:09:44] Now, the third pitfall here, and if you read the fine print on some of these they will say, these tools work best if you have a pretty predictable schedule. I repeat these tools work best if you have a pretty predictable schedule, and one of them actually said in quotes, works best with predictability. 

[00:10:10] Now, every day, if anything's changing in your life and you need to shift something, right? You wake up in the morning and now you've got a sick kiddo. And now you're having to shift your schedule around, you have to go back into your tool, plug in that change, and then it's going to suggest how to replan, and then you have to approve it, right? 

[00:10:31] It's making decisions of how it's gonna accommodate this change. Meaning it's deciding how it's gonna move everything around, and I plugged in a lot of different scenarios with this, and every single time the decision that the tool made of how it was gonna replan and reschedule it. Was horrible and it had me like basically sleeping less in order to accommodate life's, you know, life's pivots. 

[00:11:00] And it was just a lot. I felt like I spent more time feeding it information and approving things than if I, than when I just have my paper plan in front of me, the plan I created and I can see it all and go, here's how I'm moving things around. Right, because. It made the decision of what to move instead of me going, I'm moving it It does not absorb changes in the short term very well at all. if you have a lot of uncertainty and a lot of unpredictability, I. I feel like they're almost telling you don't use these, and most of the women that I work with fall in that umbrella. Now, pitfall number four is this. They're not the easiest of learning curves. 

[00:11:42] If you do not consider yourself pretty tech savvy or comfortable with tech, you're gonna just, you're gonna be driven crazy. I got frustrated with some of the setup steps and I, I know the domain really well, right? I know planning, I know time management, I know calendars, and I'm. I'm comfortable in tech. 

[00:12:00] My daughter tells me I can't call myself tech savvy anymore. But I think I am when it comes to software and as I was onboarding onto one of these tools, they even recommended the tool itself to say, just start with your work tasks. Like, let's get you comfortable with managing that. And then we can layer in different categories. 

[00:12:21] Well, that's not helpful to me in the short term, right? If I just layer in my work tasks without all my other categories, as a working mom, it's gonna create a plan that I, it's not gonna include school pickup and the morning routine, and the afterschool lessons, and the homeworks and, and all of that, right? 

[00:12:36] So the onboarding is, is not great. And then again, the fifth one that I touched on a little bit around the predictability is these tools. Make decisions for you on when you're doing it and when you're doing it. They're just making it based on what mathematically fits, almost think of it like a Tetris puzzle, right? 

[00:12:59] They're getting all these pieces and they're like, Ooh, how can we get as much in here as possible? As opposed to the things that I, I know we have to have to create good plans. What are your energy levels at different times of the day? Right? What's the reality of your week? How much uncertainty do you need to create space for? 

[00:13:19] It is not including any of that. It is just making decisions from what I could tell based on math, right? You need 30 minutes for this thing. I see 30 minutes here as a first spot. I'm going to put it in there. It's not thinking about efficiencies, it's not thinking about routines. It doesn't care if aligning task one right after task two is really bad because it doesn't know that. 

[00:13:44] Like, okay, task one. I'm in this frame of mind. I've got all these resources open and now switching over to task two is like a com complete shift of thought in everything. It doesn't know how to make really good decisions around being efficient with your time. Right. So quick recap here and then I wanna, I wanna talk, I wanna shift gears on where does AI fit in. 

[00:14:07] So these five pitfalls, they assume your digital calendar is 100% accurate. Of everything they assume you know how to prioritize. They work best with predictability and not changing much. Number four, they're not an easy learning curve. And number five, they are making all of the decisions for you around what you do and when you do it without the full picture of who you are as an individual. 

[00:14:37] Now let's talk about AI in general. All right? And someone actually the other day, they're like, you know, someone was telling me that they're using one of these tools and loving it. And it was a former male colleague of mine and I, and we were chatting well, as we dug into it a little bit more, I'm like, Hmm. 

[00:14:54] He's using it at work just for work hours with his work tasks where he serves one role. and it's a pretty predictable job. So I said, okay. But again, it's because there's very little, you know, it's, it's a very predictable schedule, very little change. And he's only using it for one role. He's not integrating caregiver and all this other stuff in there. 

[00:15:17] And he said, you know, again, he'll still have problems with it because he is like, it's great for him if. He gives it 100% clean inputs and has predictable time blocks. So I'm like, well then why the heck do you need it anyway? Right. So let's talk about where does AI fit in? I think it's important for us to understand. 

[00:15:41] I. AI tools such as, you know, some of the top two or top three people use chat, GPT Claude Perplexity. But specifically in this scenario, thinking about chat, GPT and Claude the results that you get back when you are asking questions of AI and leveraging AI are, are only as good as the data you put in. 

[00:16:03] If you give vague questions. You may not get a great response back. Right? It may it, and in some cases it can spit back. Wrong information because it doesn't know everything yet. And AI is not a mind reader. Right? And think about that with a planning tool, AI can't jump into my mind and know, oh yeah, okay. 

[00:16:25] Megan really doesn't do that type of work well past 1:00 PM so let's not schedule those kinds of tasks. Right. It doesn't know as I'm going to bed. Oh boy. It looks like my kiddo may be coming down with a cold. Let me already start thinking about how I may need to shift things around in the morning. 

[00:16:39] Right? it can't be in my mind, knowing all of the things, the emotions, the energy, the biological shifts, all of that needed to make good plants. Now let's also discuss a little bit here how these AI planning tools are built. All right. And any AI planning tool means someone, a human being, programmed this tool with the knowledge it wants it to have and the rules it wants it to follow. 

[00:17:12] So I repeat these AI planning tools, a human being sat down and said. Here's the knowledge I want you to have, and here are the rules I want you to follow, which means if you are using an AI planning tool, you are essentially saying, I'm trusting the person behind this, that they know good planning and time management strategies, and I am signing up to follow their planning framework. 

[00:17:46] so for all we know, there may be an AI planning tool out there that just says, Hey, fit as much in as you can for every single open space on the calendar until you run outta room. That might be the rule behind one of these, these AI planning tools. Is that the rule that you wanna have when you live your life? 

[00:18:08] It's not the rule I wanna have. I don't want my calendar to say, the minute I wake up to the minute I go to bed, I'm getting stuff done on my list. We don't have, as consumers of custom AI tools. We typically are not given the knowledge and the framework and the rules that were built into the tool to know upfront. 

[00:18:30] Is this even in alignment? Do I like these rules? Is this a system I want to follow? What you're doing without realizing it is you are handing over the decision making to somebody else that decided how they are gonna make decisions for you. All right, and this is why I have yet to find an AI planning tool that I can get to work right for my life is clearly whoever's programming the system and the decision making do not share the same values, priorities, or systems that I share. 

[00:19:04] I. On how I plan and manage my time. And I'm gonna hedge a bet here. Again, this is total skeptical. I, I have no proof of this statement, but I feel pretty confident that I. These are not being consulted by or having input from women who are working and caregiving and juggling all the things. 'cause I think it would handle it and ask different questions than it does. 

[00:19:32] So now that I've kind of given you all the reasons why I. Do not recommend, especially for women, especially for working moms. Like, I just don't recommend the AI planning tools yet. Could, could one be built? Could one day, Megan Summer will come in and build an AI planning tool based on the top framework. 

[00:19:51] Who knows, right? Who knows where these things are going? But as of right now what are we looking at? May, 2025, I have yet to find one that I, I could personally make work. But I mentioned at the beginning of this episode, I use AI every day and I also use it to help me plan. So where does this fit in right now? 

[00:20:12] Remember, I, I, I mentioned the data that you get out of planning tools is only as good as the data you put in. So I will give you one example. There are a million of them. Where AI can support planning, and we were actually just talking about this on our I hold a monthly live coaching call with all the women going through the top program and someone had shared, you know, basically they had a, a new job, if you will. 

[00:20:37] And they're like, I'm trying to figure out what all the things are and how to fit it in So I said, well, this is a great example of where you could layer in ai or maybe you have a new project you wanna do so maybe you've decided, Hey, I'm launching a podcast. Right? You know nothing about it. 

[00:20:52] Well, this is where leveraging AI to help you research, I. Is incredibly powerful, but as long as you're doing it under the lens of the information that you put in, dictates how good of information you put out. If I were to open up an AI prompt and say, I'm starting a podcast, what do I do first? You're probably not gonna get great information back. 

[00:21:14] Right? That's a very vague question, so many people leaning into AI are being very vague because we're taking our. Google searching brain and trying to plug it into an AI prompt. And we need to realize that AI is really a language. We need to have conversations with our AI tools. So instead of, Hey, I'm starting a podcast, what do I do first? 

[00:21:39] We need to provide it with. All the data that we know. I have a desire to be starting a podcast. This is the topic of it. This is how often I wanna do releases. I have no idea what software platform I wanna put it on yet, but I know I want it to be something similar to the Work-Life Harmony podcast. They do a drop every Tuesday. 

[00:22:02] Her episodes are about 25 minutes long, and you're plugging. All this information in, and then you're saying, what I'd really love is I need to create a realistic plan of what are all the steps that I need to take? What are all the things that I need to consider as I'm getting ready to launch my podcast? 

[00:22:19] I'd be plugging all of that information in. It's very different than a Google search of how do I start a podcast. Right. So I 100% recommend using AI tools to help you research, to help you understand what are all the steps that I might need to consider. I. That ultimately are gonna show up in my plan for the week or the month, and how much time these things might take me so that I can start to put a realistic plan in place and then start plugging it into my calendar for projects that I wanna do. 

[00:22:54] AI is gonna be probably one of your new best friends to help you research that kind of stuff, but only if you're giving it good data, And. Recognizing that conversation and getting information back out isn't the same thing as allowing it to make decisions for you, right? I'm asking for advice. 

[00:23:16] Gimme your best bet, lemme give you some examples. What do you recommend? I. But then always friends, always the decision making needs to happen by you, right? If it's recommending a plan, I get to be the one to go, Hmm, I don't, that doesn't feel right. I don't understand that. Let me ask more. Or, I know for myself, it'd be better if I did this before that, right? 

[00:23:36] We can't let it replace our critical thinking skills. That it can be an incredibly valuable resource as you are potentially researching or needing help and suggestions around things that are ultimately going to end into your weekly plan. So I trust that you found this helpful here today, especially if you've been, you know, exploring some of these AI planning tools. 

[00:24:00] I'm always keeping, you know, my finger on the pulse of it. If I see one come out that's amazing, I will absolutely share it with you all. But for now I would. Say, you know, except for the example of my former male colleague that I mentioned, like if you're living a life like I am right now, I would say don't make your investment in those, in those planning tools. 

[00:24:21] Now at the time this episode drops, we are here in May of 2025, and this is a pretty awesome, exciting month because this happens to be the five year anniversary of the Pink Bee. I am the CEO of the Pink Bee, officially went all in on this business five years ago this month, and to celebrate, I'm gonna be holding a fun. 

[00:24:41] Live Birthday Bash. It's gonna be out on YouTube just to be there to answer your questions. I mean, you can get some free time management coaching out there as well. But more importantly, I'm also going to be giving out some amazing gifts. I'm gonna be giving away some free planners and I'm actually giving away two. 

[00:24:59] 30 minute private sessions with me. I don't do individual one-on-one coaching. That is not a product or a service that I offer. So this is gonna be an awesome opportunity for two lucky winners. So if you want a chance to win any of those and to come join me on our live birthday Bash, all you need to do is register registering for the live event. 

[00:25:18] Puts you in the drawing and just head over to megan somer.com/birthday and I hope to see you there celebrating the, the fifth birthday of the Pink Bee. All right, guys, have a fantastic week. See you back here soon.