Meet Arthur
My imaginary friend who is helping me survive Christmas.
Meet Arthur
My imaginary friend who is helping me survive Christmas.
Arthur is brilliant. He’s put 23 calendar invites in my family calendar.
Twenty-three!!
I originally built Arthur for last half-term chaos. We were taking two young kids (3 and 5) to the south of France, and I needed someone who would remember the wet wipes, recommend child-friendly restaurants and activities, and generally prevent the kind of holiday meltdown that comes from forgetting someone’s comfort toy at home.
Arthur made sure I didn’t forget anything.
Not the adapters. Not the travel-size Calpol. Not Snuggles.
But then Christmas started looming.
And I needed Arthur again.
You see, as a creative I might do my best work in the creative chaos that is my brain, but in life I thrive on organisation.
Dave (my other AI assistant) handles business. Arthur handles everything else.
Arthur is part travel agent, part over-excited camp organizer, part deeply practical personal assistant who always has a useful parenting hack up his sleeve.
Why Arthur exists
Dave is brilliant at business logistics.
He plans keynotes. Organizes travel. Remembers when I need to leave for the airport.
But Dave doesn’t know what to do with ‘gingerbread houses’ or ‘neighbours’ Christmas drinks’ or the fact that December contains feels like there’s approximately forty-seven (I’m exaggerating for effect here!) overlapping social obligations that all require different levels of preparation.
That’s Arthur’s domain.
Arthur is built specifically for family planning. For the logistics that don’t show up in your work calendar but somehow take up all your mental space anyway.
He’s warm, sweet, and completely non-judgmental.
He understands that “Christmas drinks” isn’t just one calendar entry. It’s shopping, prep, tidying before and after, and probably remembering to buy ice because you always forget the ice.
His job isn’t to optimise your life into joylessness. It’s to hold the logistics so you don’t have to.
This week’s test: Christmas planning
I handed Arthur a mess.
A scrappy handwritten to-do list (yes, with kids’ drawings on it) featuring: gingerbread house making, cinema outing, multiple Christmas drinks, presents for kids and teachers and family and friends, and “bonfire + marshmallows??” scrawled at the bottom with a question mark that suggested even I didn’t believe it would happen.
Arthur read it like a human would. Grouped it. Sorted it. Suggested which days were best for what activity, including when to relax.
Then I gave him screenshots of my calendar. Dates I couldn’t move, like my daughter’s Christmas performance and French Christmas (we celebrate on Christmas Eve, naturellement).
What Arthur actually did
He mapped everything onto real days.
Balanced busy days with deliberately light ones.
Flagged when I needed to order presents with delivery time built in.
Scheduled food shopping before we lost out on all the delivery slots.
Built in rest days so the whole thing didn’t feel relentless.
When I said “we’ve already seen that film” or “carolling won’t happen in time, maybe a panto instead”, he just updated the plan.
Voila!
Then came the cherry on top
Arthur helped me divide the workload with my husband.
Not in a “you do this, I’ll do that” way. But properly. Fairly. With actual thought.
He put twenty-three invites in our family calendar.
I hadn’t even clocked how many there were until Arthur laid them out all neatly: school events, parties, drinks, playdates and the prepping we needed to think about in between.
Making the invisible work visible
And talking of prepping - that’s one of Arthur’s best moves!
Not just what we were doing, but everything around it. Buying food for parties. Prepping for playdates. Cleaning just enough before people come over.
It might seem small and trivial stuff but it helps our brains tremendously to know when we need to do stuff.
The result
Arthur turned our family calendar chaos into something we could actually use.
All synced to Google Calendar through a simple .csv file import.
Will it get done exactly in that order? Absolutely not.
Will things get forgotten? You betcha.
Will plans change? You can count on it.
But here’s what changed: I stopped carrying everything in my head.
Arthur holds the boring logistics so I can focus on the bit that actually matters.
Want Arthur?
He’s free.
And nicely wrapped up for you for Christmas.
Subscribe and he’ll land straight in your inbox.
You’ll also get Dave, Roxie, and whatever other AI characters I build along the way
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