I've always struggled with "life admin" work. And becoming a parent made it harder: more random stuff, less free time.
In theory, the answer is: spin up a family AI agent that takes care of the busywork. But in practice, it's easy to spend more time building the system than actually getting value from it!
Over the past few months, though, I feel like I've finally landed on a family agent that really works. It handles weekly meal planning and orders groceries; it can help with routine emails and scheduling; it can answer quick questions like “Did we schedule that appointment yet?”; and it is doing a lot of the work for planning an upcoming move.
What's the secret? Well, as with so many things in life, it's about nailing the basics: the agent needs the right context. I call this context a “butler's book”, as an analogy to the old way of assembling context about a household:
Back in Victorian times, the Butler’s Book was where the butler kept all the information about the household: staff and maintenance schedules, inventory of china and silverware, food preferences, measurements for clothing, etc.
In this post I will show you how I've assembled a modern-day butler's book, and I hope you take away some ideas for constructing your own.
(This post is Certified Organic. No AI was used to write it; 100% typed with my own two hands.)
What's in the book
A Butler's Book is a curated set of knowledge about your family, including background, routines, and projects. Some examples of documents in ours:
Basic background info about all of us Weekly meal plans and a family recipe library
Financial plans and tax records
List of household appliances with manuals
Plans for upcoming travel
Ideas for household projects
Records for boring stuff like insurance
Instructions for repeated procedures like grocery shopping
When your agent has access to all of this information, it feels like it actually and can quickly provide value without you needing to explain everything from scratch every time.