Family Calendar & Household Assistant

Pain Point

• Calendar fragmentation: Work calendars have security restrictions. School calendars arrive as PDFs. Camp schedules live in emails. No single view exists.
• Household coordination overhead: "How much milk do we have?" requires physically checking the fridge, then texting back. Multiply across a week.
• Missed appointments: Appointment confirmations arrive via text and sit there — no calendar event, no driving time buffer, no reminder.

What You Can Do

• Morning briefing: Aggregate all family calendars into a single daily summary.
• Ambient message monitoring: Watch iMessage conversations and automatically create calendar events when it detects appointments.
• Driving time buffers: Add travel time blocks before and after detected appointments.
• Household inventory: Maintain a running inventory of pantry/fridge items that either partner can query.
• Grocery coordination: Deduplicate ingredients, track what's running low, generate shopping lists.
• Photo-based input: Snap a photo of a school calendar or freezer contents and the agent processes it into structured data.

Skills You Need

• Calendar API access (Google Calendar, Apple Calendar via ical)
• imessage skill for message monitoring (macOS only)
• Telegram or Slack for the shared family chat interface
• File system access for inventory tracking
• Camera/photo processing for OCR of physical calendars

How to Set It Up

1. Calendar Aggregation

Configure OpenClaw to pull from all family calendar sources:

## Calendar Sources

On morning briefing (8:00 AM):

1. Fetch my Google Work Calendar (read-only OAuth)
2. Fetch shared Family Google Calendar
3. Fetch partner's calendar (shared view)
4. Check ~/Documents/school-calendars/ for any new PDFs → OCR and extract events
5. Check recent emails for calendar attachments or event invitations

Compile into a single briefing:
- Today's events (all calendars, color-coded by source)
- Upcoming 3-day lookahead for conflicts
- Any new events added since yesterday
- Weather context for outdoor events

Deliver via Telegram/Slack family channel.

2. Ambient Message Monitoring

This is the key differentiator — the agent watches passively and acts when it recognizes something actionable:

## Message Monitoring (HEARTBEAT.md)

Every 15 minutes:
1. Check new iMessages across all conversations
2. Detect appointment-like patterns:
   - "Your appointment is confirmed for..."
   - "Can we meet on [date] at [time]?"
   - "Practice moved to Saturday at 3pm"
3. When detected:
   - Create calendar event with details
   - Add 30-minute driving buffer before AND after
   - Send confirmation to family Telegram: "Created: Dentist appointment, Tue 2pm. Added drive time 1:30-2:00 and 3:00-3:30."
   - If relevant to partner, add invite
4. Detect promise/commitment patterns:
   - "I'll send that over by Friday"
   - "Let's do dinner next week"
   → Create calendar hold or reminder

3. Household Inventory

## Pantry Tracking

Maintain ~/household/inventory.json with:
- Item name, quantity, location (fridge/pantry/basement)
- Last updated timestamp
- Low-stock threshold

Update methods:
- Photo: User sends photo of fridge/pantry → vision model extracts items
- Text: "We're out of eggs" / "Bought 2 gallons of milk"
- Receipt: Photo of grocery receipt → update inventory

Query: Either partner can ask via Telegram:
- "Do we have butter?" → Check inventory, respond with location and quantity
- "What's running low?" → List items below threshold
- "Generate grocery list" → Compile low-stock items + any recipe ingredients needed

Key Insights

• Ambient > active: The biggest unlock is the agent acting without being asked. "I didn't ask it to do that. It just knew that's what I'd want."
• Mac Mini is the sweet spot: iMessage integration, Apple Calendar, and always-on availability.
• Start read-only: Begin with calendar reading and message monitoring before enabling write actions.
• Shared Telegram channel: Gives both partners visibility into what the agent is doing — builds trust.
• Photo input is underrated: Snapping a photo of a school calendar or freezer contents is faster than typing.

Inspired By

• Calendar aggregation: HN user angiolillo, who detailed the pain of checking 5+ calendars separately each morning.
• Ambient monitoring: Sparkry AI — OpenClaw automatically created a calendar event with driving buffers from a dental appointment text, without being asked.
• Ambient monitoring also confirmed on the OpenClaw Showcase, where @theaaron called chat-based calendar management "one of the best uses of an LLM I've ever experienced."
• Household coordination: Brandon Wang's Clawdbot "Linguini" running on a Mac Mini — handling text follow-ups, calendar events from photos, tracking Airbnb prices, processing freezer inventory photos, and coordinating household logistics via iMessage and Slack.
• Pantry tracking: Multiple HN users discussed the value (and challenge) of maintaining household inventory, with dns_snek noting: "I forget where I put things down 5 seconds ago... It's genuinely a big problem for me because I let things expire."

Related Links

• OpenClaw iMessage Skill
• Google Calendar API
• Apple Calendar (EventKit)
• OpenClaw Showcase — Calendar Testimonials

Deploy with ShipClaw

Skip the setup — get a fully managed OpenClaw instance ready to run this use case.

Quick Start

1. Pick a plan — Pro recommended for this use case
2. Go to your Instances Dashboard and click Deploy New Instance
3. Once deployed, use the sample prompt above to configure your agent
4. Customize thresholds, schedules, and sources to fit your workflow