AI in project management: Large-scale planning made easy

Lessons learned from using AI for personal and professional planning.

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Determining all the tasks required for a project, such as a wedding, event, or conference talk, can be challenging. With AI, you can easily create a starting point to help you identify the tasks you need to complete to get started planning. 

Recently, when I started wedding planning, I wasn’t sure exactly where to get started, and I used this method to provide a starting point. This blog post will guide you through the steps to plan a project using a Mermaid chart and checklist. 

Step 1: Starting with a prompt

Suppose you are looking to create a new code sample and turn it into a conference talk. You can ask the LLM of your choosing to develop a plan and an image. I used Claude for this purpose, but you can use ChatGPT or Gemini. 

Here is an example prompt you can use to get started:

Can you create a 12-week project plan for a GitHub repo, video, 
blog post, and conference talk abstract to submit to conferences 
around a new code sample idea? I'd like to have a Mermaid chart 
that I can cut and paste into Notion or Trello, along with a 
complete plan to cut and paste too. I'd like the dates to start 
with November 1st 2025.

You should get a response that looks similar to the following:

Step 2: Creating a new page

In the project planning tool of your choice, create a new page titled “Code sample plan” and add a title. I used Notion for this example. To learn more about the process for creating a new page, check out their article on the subject.

Step 3: Adding your chart 

Now that you have your page, you can add the Mermaid chart. Mermaid is a JavaScript-based charting tool that enables you to create visualizations, such as diagrams, easily. For this blog post, you are going to make a Gantt chart.

To add your chart, you can add a code block to your page and select Mermaid as the language of the code block. At this point, you should copy and paste the code from your LLM. For Claude, I pressed the “Copy” button.

From there, the code you will want to paste in should look similar to the following:

gantt
    title 12-Week Code Sample Project Timeline (Nov 2025 - Jan 2026)
    dateFormat  YYYY-MM-DD
    axisFormat  %b %d
    
    section Research & Planning
    Market research & concept validation    :milestone, a1, 2025-11-01, 7d
    Technical architecture planning         :milestone, a2, 2025-11-08, 7d
    
    section GitHub Repository
    Initial repo setup & documentation     :active, b1, 2025-11-15, 7d
    Core code development                   :crit, b2, 2025-11-22, 14d
    Testing & refinement                    :b3, 2025-12-06, 7d
    Documentation completion                :b4, 2025-12-13, 7d
    Community engagement prep               :b5, 2025-12-20, 7d
    
    section Blog Post
    Content outline & research              :c1, 2025-11-29, 7d
    First draft writing                     :c2, 2025-12-06, 7d
    Review & editing                        :c3, 2025-12-13, 7d
    Final draft & publication               :milestone, c4, 2025-12-20, 7d
    
    section Video Content
    Script development                      :d1, 2025-12-13, 7d
    Recording & initial edit               :d2, 2025-12-20, 7d
    Post-production & final edit           :d3, 2025-12-27, 7d
    Publishing & promotion                 :milestone, d4, 2026-01-10, 7d
    
    section Conference Abstract
    Abstract drafting                      :e1, 2025-12-27, 7d
    Peer review & refinement              :e2, 2026-01-03, 7d
    Submission to conferences             :crit, milestone, e3, 2026-01-10, 7d
    
    section Launch & Promotion
    Cross-platform promotion campaign     :f1, 2026-01-17, 7d
    Final community engagement            :milestone, f2, 2026-01-24, 7d

Inside of your project management tool, you should see something similar to the following:

You may need to click where it says “preview,” depending on your project management tool.

Step 4: Adding the list 

Your LLM will also provide you with a list of tasks to copy and paste into your project management software, following the same process as in the previous step.  

If you cut and paste the list of tasks into your project management software, you should see a similar to this page:

Conclusion

While this is a great starting point for managing large projects, numerous adjustments are needed. Based on my own experience, this created a great starting point for key tasks, such as finding a wedding venue, and alerted me to some smaller, yet important, tasks that might be overlooked, which will require some adjustments to personalize. 

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