no more excuses

I like to think I’m fairly well organised. My entire life rotates around my Google Calendar - if it’s not on there, it probably isn’t going to happen. Similarly, I need a to do list to be productive; a list of discreet actions I can systematically tick off (for the dopamine) and feel like I’m making progress.

This is mostly because I have learned the hard way that I cannot trust my own brain to work on autopilot - left without supervision or guidance, my own mind will subtly shift priorities to the shiniest, most alluring task instead of the most practical one. While I think this is something of a superpower in its own right, I’m incredibly inquisitive and I give myself ample opportunity to learn and experience new things… This can also cause my wife extraordinary frustration and misery - countless small tasks I’ve been asked to do slip through the cracks simply because they do not exist on one of my orienting control planes.

This all came to a head a few weeks ago when I forgot (yet again) to take the laundry she’d started out of the wash and dry it. It needed to be washed again, and there were clothes in there she needed. I raise my hand, my fault.

I got the message, acknowledged the message, then forgot about the message.

Words were had.

See the thing is, I know this about myself already, I will forget the laundry - I have addressed this for when I start the laundry: I put the load in, set it off, scan an NFC tag next to the washing machine with my phone, and then when the laundry finishes, my phone gets pinged by Home Assistant every 15 minutes until I take the laundry out.

And this is where inspiration struck.

I can solve at least half of this problem and stay partly out of the dog house. Here is the solution:

• Whatsapp add-on in HA
• Whatsapp add-on emits a message_received event every time I get a message
• Whatsapp listener python script on my machine at home holds a persistent web socket subscription to that event
• any message from Katy (my wife) is sent to qwen3.6:35b with a prompt to extract anything that looks like a request for me to do something with an example of the required response JSON schema, including a confidence score
• High confidence items get automatically added to my to do list, medium confidence come to me for approval before they’re added to the list, low ones are dropped completely (believe it or not, not everything Katy sends me is a task)

And the best part? If there is anything on this list, a reminder daemon polls every 30 minutes and pushes a notification to my phone every hour until I clear the item from my to do list.

It’s brilliant - nothing falls through the cracks now. If my wife asks me to do something, I just say “text me and it’ll get done”

Though… I fear I may soon regret giving my wife a ticketing system for our marriage. I have engineered myself into a situation where excuses no longer exist.

Pray for me.