Productivity prompt
AI Prompt for Weekly Planning and a Weekly Review
ChatGPTClaudeGemini
The short answer
A guided weekly review that sorts last week's wreckage, picks three outcomes that matter and builds a realistic plan. Realistic. Not heroic. Copy the prompt below, replace the 7 [BRACKETED] variables with your own, and paste it into ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini.
You are a pragmatic productivity coach. You help people plan weeks they can actually complete, not fantasy schedules.
CONTEXT
- My role and main responsibilities: [ROLE]
- Goals for this quarter: [QUARTERLY_GOALS]
- What I planned last week and what actually happened: [LAST_WEEK]
- Everything on my plate (brain dump, any order): [TASK_DUMP]
- Fixed commitments this week (meetings, deadlines, appointments): [FIXED_COMMITMENTS]
- Realistic hours of focused work available: [FOCUS_HOURS]
- Energy patterns (when I do my best deep work): [ENERGY_PATTERNS]
TASK
Run a weekly review and build next week's plan.
RULES
- Choose a maximum of 3 key outcomes for the week, each tied to a quarterly goal or a hard deadline.
- Total planned focus work must fit inside FOCUS_HOURS with at least 20% buffer for the unexpected.
- Estimate task durations and flag any estimate that looks optimistic.
- Be honest about what should be deferred, delegated, or dropped. Do not try to fit everything.
- Do not invent tasks or deadlines I didn't mention.
OUTPUT FORMAT
1. Last week review: what went well, what slipped and the likely reason, one lesson to apply.
2. This week's 3 key outcomes, each with a "done looks like..." definition.
3. Task triage: Do this week / Schedule later / Delegate (to whom, if obvious) / Drop.
4. Day-by-day plan: deep work blocks matched to my energy patterns, shallow work batched, fixed commitments included.
5. The one thing that, if done by Wednesday, makes the week a success.
6. Risks to the plan and how to protect against each.
End with 2 questions I should ask myself on Friday to review this week.What to fill in
Everything in [GOLD CAPS] is yours to replace. Leave one blank and the machine will guess — and the machine guesses like a meatbag on a Monday.
[ROLE][QUARTERLY_GOALS][LAST_WEEK][TASK_DUMP][FIXED_COMMITMENTS][FOCUS_HOURS][ENERGY_PATTERNS]
How to use it
- Do the brain dump unedited. If you pre-filter, you smuggle the guilt in anyway.
- If the AI drops something you care about, argue with it. That argument is the actual prioritisation.
- Push the day-by-day blocks into Motion or Reclaim so the calendar defends them while you get distracted.
Example
ROLE: solo marketing manager at a B2B startup
QUARTERLY_GOALS: launch new website, grow newsletter
FOCUS_HOURS: 14
TASK_DUMP: finish homepage copy, review agency designs, write 2 newsletters, fix analytics tags, plan webinar, expense report...Works with
Tested for ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini. Any modern chat model that follows long instructions will cope; the weaker ones will need you to restate the output format if they drift.
Weapons from the Arsenal that pair well with this prompt:
- Motion — AI calendar and project manager that auto-schedules your tasks around your meetings.
- Reclaim.ai — AI scheduling for Google and Outlook calendars: protects focus time, habits and meetings automatically.
- Notion — All-in-one workspace for docs, wikis and databases, with Notion AI agents and meeting notes built in.