The five prompts
Here they are, in order. Do the brain dump first — it takes two minutes and every prompt after it is working off that pile.
Run all five in the SAME chat. That is the whole trick. Claude only holds your brain dump for as long as the conversation lasts, so a fresh chat between prompts means starting again from "so what are you working on?". Same window, top to bottom.
First: get it out of your head
Open a new Claude chat and empty your head into it. Messy is fine. Half-sentences are fine. Do not sort it, do not put it in categories, do not make it look reasonable — sorting it is literally what you are about to ask for.
Here is everything that is in my head right now. It is unsorted and some of it contradicts itself. Do not respond to it yet, just read it and tell me you have it. [dump everything here - work, admin, the thing you keep forgetting, the decision you are avoiding, the message you have not replied to]
Then run these, one after the other
Prompt 1 turns the pile into three buckets, so you stop treating a February problem like a this-afternoon problem.
Turn this brain dump into today, later this week and this month.
Prompt 2 is the one that earns its keep. Most overwhelmed days are not twenty separate problems — they are one unmade decision with nineteen things stacked behind it.
Find the one decision blocking everything else.
Prompt 3 is for when you know roughly what you want but cannot say it cleanly. One question at a time matters — a wall of six questions is how you end up answering none of them.
Ask me one question at a time until the brief is clear.
Prompt 4 has a second sentence for a reason. Left alone, Claude will happily offer to build you a beautiful system for managing the thing instead of doing the thing.
Make the first ugly version. Do not ask me to organise anything today.
Prompt 5 is the one to run last, when you can see the shape of the day and you want everything that is not genuinely yours off your plate.
Tell me what only I can decide, then handle the rest.
Yes, they really are that short
I know the going rate for a "prompt" these days is four hundred words of role-play and formatting instructions. These are short on purpose. You are not trying to configure Claude — you are trying to get one specific thing out of a conversation it can already see. The context does the heavy lifting, which is exactly why the one-chat rule matters more than the wording does.
How to actually run them
About fifteen minutes, start to finish, the first time you do it. Faster after that.
Open one chat and leave it open
Do not close it, do not start a new one for the "next bit". Everything below happens in this one window. If you have to come back after lunch, scroll up and keep typing in the same place.
Dump first, sort never
Paste prompt 0 and empty your head underneath it. Resist tidying. The instinct to make the list presentable before you hand it over is the same instinct that has you reorganising your desktop instead of writing the proposal.
Run 1 and 2 back to back
Sort by when, then find the jam. Do these two together every time — the buckets on their own just give you a tidier version of the same overwhelm. Prompt 2 is what actually changes your afternoon.
Pick ONE thing off the today pile, then run 3 and 4
Name the thing out loud in the chat, let it interview you until the brief is clear, then ask for the ugly version. You are aiming to finish this step with a bad draft of something real, not a plan for making one.
Finish with 5, and actually read the list
The short list it hands back is your genuine workload for the day. Everything on the other side of that line is either delegatable, automatable or was never a real task. Cross those off before you go anywhere near them.
The mistake almost everyone makes
Starting a fresh chat for each prompt because it feels tidier. Do that and prompt 5 has no idea what your brain dump said, so it gives you generic advice about delegation instead of telling you that the only thing on your list only you can decide is the pricing question you have been avoiding since Tuesday. One chat. It is the difference between a novelty and something you use every week.
Which one to reach for
Run all five when the whole day has gone sideways. On an ordinary Tuesday you usually just need one. Find how you are stuck, use that one.
"There is too much and I cannot see any of it"
Start hereEverything is a blur and it all feels like it is due now. You are not disorganised — you are holding twenty items in your head at once, which is roughly seventeen more than anyone can rank properly. Dump, then run prompt 1. Seeing "this is a February problem" written down does something a to-do list never manages.
"I keep going round in circles"
The best oneYou have opened the same three tabs four times today and closed all of them. That is almost never a focus problem. There is one unmade decision underneath, and everything downstream of it is stuck waiting. Prompt 2 names it. It is uncomfortable in a useful way.
"I know what I want but it comes out as mush"
For briefsYou start typing the request, delete it, start again. Stop writing the brief and let it interview you instead. One question at a time is the important bit — you answer six-at-once questions badly, and then get a badly-aimed answer built on top of them.
"I have been getting organised for three days"
Anti-procrastinationYou have a colour-coded plan for the thing and none of the thing. Prompt 4 blocks the escape route in its second sentence, which is why it is worded like that. What comes back will be genuinely rough. Good — a bad draft you can fix beats a perfect system for one you have not started.
"I am doing things anyone could do"
End of dayThe day disappeared into admin and none of it needed you specifically. Prompt 5 splits the list into decisions that are actually yours and everything else. Run it last, when there is enough in the chat for it to judge properly.
What this will not fix
Being straight with you about the edges, because a prompt pack that promises to fix your whole life is a prompt pack you use once.
It will not make the decision for you
Prompt 2 finds the blocker. Prompt 5 hands you the shortlist. Neither of them decides — and if you ask Claude to pick, it will pick, confidently, on almost no information. That is a worse outcome than deciding badly yourself, because at least you would know it was a guess. The prompts get you to the decision faster. Sitting with it is still your job.
A few other honest limits:
- It does not reduce the work. It removes the cost of ranking the work, which on a bad day is most of what is exhausting you — but the tasks are all still there afterwards.
- The ugly version is properly ugly. Prompt 4 does what it says. If you were hoping for something publishable, that is prompt 4 plus another forty minutes of you.
- If everything genuinely is urgent, this will not help. That is a capacity problem, not a clarity problem, and no prompt fixes a diary with more in it than hours. Prompt 5 will at least tell you which bits are not yours to carry.
- It works off what you gave it. A thin brain dump gets thin answers. The two minutes of messy typing at the start is doing more work than any of the five lines that follow it.
Where these came from
These are the five I actually use, not five I invented for a video. Prompt 2 is the one I run most and the one I resisted longest, because it usually tells me the blocker is something I already knew and had been walking past for a week.
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