The problem: planning for a week that was never actually there

Kat, an ADHD coach and former software engineer, kept running into the same pattern: she'd overestimate what she could realistically get done in a week, then feel like she was failing to meet goals that were unrealistic in the first place. A calendar full of meetings shows what time is already spoken for. It doesn't show what's actually left — and that gap is where the overcommitting happens.

Reality-checking time estimates instead of guessing at them

Her starting move is to ask AI to reality-check the numbers directly: where did last week's time actually go, how much of it sat in meetings, how much was genuinely open. For ADHD specifically, internal time perception can't be trusted to answer that question on its own — as she put it, two hours can feel like ten minutes and ten minutes can feel like two hours. The fix isn't willpower, it's an external, accurate source of truth.

A skill that turns a calendar into pomodoro-sized free blocks

She built a Claude Skill — again, by asking Claude to write it, not by coding it herself — that reads her Google Calendar for each weekday within working hours, finds the gaps between meetings, and converts them into pomodoro-sized chunks (roughly 30 minutes, including break time) instead of raw start and end times. A block labeled '10:00–6:00, minus meetings' doesn't mean much to her brain. A count of usable pomodoros does.

Landing as a color-coded table, not another wall of text

The skill builds a table tile directly in xTiles for the week, color-coded so free stretches are visually obvious at a glance, showing total free hours, total free pomodoros, and the single biggest open block for each day. That last number matters most in practice: knowing where the biggest uninterrupted stretch actually falls is what tells her when to slot in the tasks she planned rather than fighting her calendar for space after the fact.

A lighter-touch way to connect a calendar

Rather than connecting AI directly to her primary Gmail and calendar, Kat set up a separate admin email account and gave it delegated view access to her calendar — the same mechanism a business would use to give an assistant calendar visibility without full account access. It's a personal setup choice, not a requirement, but it's one way to keep a calendar connection scoped to exactly what's needed.

Why a visual answer works better than a text summary here

The same free-time data read out as a paragraph of AI-generated text would technically contain the same information — but a color-coded table is something you register in a glance instead of something you have to read and translate into a mental picture. For time blindness specifically, closing that gap between data and feeling is the entire point.