When the Youth Basketball Schedule Has Everything Except an "Add to Calendar" Button

I had a problem. Actually, I had a perfectly functional schedule. The park district's website listed seven weeks of youth basketball games with all the information I needed: dates, times, locations, matchups. The problem? No .ics file. No "add to calendar" button. Just text on a webpage and the prospect of manually typing 14 events into Google Calendar.

The experiment: Could I turn this static webpage into something my calendar app would actually understand?

What I Did I copy/pasted all of the schedule text from the website into ChatGPT and said: "Turn this into a .ics file I can import to Google Calendar. Here's what you need to know: Team A is our team, the first team listed wears white (home), second team wears blue (away), games are 60 minutes, add a 30-minute reminder, and we're in Central US time."

What Happened In about 90 seconds, I had a downloadable calendar file with:

Clean event titles: "Week 4 – Team A vs Team B (Blue)" All the location details properly formatted Jersey color logic built right into the title Reminders set for every game Timezone correct (because I told it to be)

One click later: 14 games imported to my calendar. Done.

Why This Matters More Than It Should Look, I could've done this manually. Would've taken me maybe 30 minutes of careful typing, double-checking times, copying field names. But here's what I would've lost:

Mental energy. Every keystroke is a micro-decision. Every field is a chance to fat-finger a time or forget which team wears white. By the time I finished, I'd be drained from something that shouldn't be draining.

Consistency. AI doesn't get bored (or interrupted by one of the basketball players) on game seven and start abbreviating things differently. Every event follows the exact same pattern because I defined that pattern once.

Reusability. Next season? Copy the prompt, paste the new schedule, export, import. Less than two minutes. Or maybe even design an agent to execute it for me when the coaches send the link to the schedule.

The Real Lesson GenAI doesn't just save time on these administrative tasks—it saves the mental overhead that makes us avoid doing them in the first place. You know that pile of "I should really..." tasks? This is how they stop being a pile.

Your turn: Find something tedious in your life that has structure (schedules, lists, repeated formats). Tell an AI what the rules are. See what happens when you stop treating your brain like a data entry clerk.

Tools Used

Tool: ChatGPTWhere to Find It: chat.openai.comCost: Free tier available; Plus subscription ($20/month) for enhanced features