Weekly plans fail when they’re todo lists. You can complete every task and still end Friday wondering what happened. These prompts force outcome-thinking: what result would make this week a clear win? They also handle the parts most plans skip — bottlenecks, spillover triage, energy budgeting, and the Friday review. For the full ritual see How to Use AI for Weekly Planning.
Best for
- Sunday-night planning
- Manager 1:1 prep
- Personal goal cycles
- Quarterly OKR roll-down
- Solo founders / side-hustlers
- Engineering or design ICs with mixed maker / meeting weeks
1. Outcomes, not tasks
Below is my todo list for the week. Convert into 3 outcomes (results, not actions) that would make the week a clear success. For each outcome:
- One-line definition of done (so I'd know on Friday if I hit it)
- The 2-3 tasks under it that actually move it
- Which tasks on my list don't ladder up to any outcome (candidates to cut)
{paste todo list}2. Friday-evening review
Below is what I planned this week vs what I actually did. Write a 200-word reflection covering:
- What surprised me (good or bad)
- The one thing I'd change about how I planned
- What rolls into next week, ranked by why it didn't ship this week
- One sentence I'd tell my Monday-morning self
Planned: {paste}
Did: {paste}3. Schedule deep-work blocks
I have these meetings (paste calendar). My top priority is {goal} needing {N} hours of focused work. Suggest 3 candidate deep-work slots that:
- Are ≥90 minutes uninterrupted
- Account for typical post-meeting recovery time
- Match my energy peaks (paste energy pattern if known)
For each slot: what trade-off I'm making and the meeting I'd need to move.
{paste calendar}4. Identify the bottleneck
My week ahead (paste plan). Identify the single thing blocking the most downstream work — the unblocker that, if shipped Monday, unlocks the most for me, my team, or my customers. Propose: do it Monday morning vs escalate to {person} vs accept the block and route around. State which and why in 3 sentences.
{paste}5. Manager 1:1 agenda
Below: my week ahead + last week's recap. Build a 1:1 agenda with my manager:
- 3 wins to share (concrete, with metrics if possible)
- 2 risks they should know about now, not at the end of the week
- 1 specific ask (decision, intro, resource)
- 1 feedback request on something specific I did
Keep it to one screen. No status-report bloat.6. Personal weekly themes
My weekly themes: work, side project, health, relationships, personal admin. For each theme, plan:
- 1 outcome for the week (not 5 tasks)
- The smallest investment of time that makes it real
- The honest reason it slipped last week (if it did)
Total weekly hours across themes should not exceed {N} after meetings. If math doesn't work, force a cut.7. Spillover triage
Below are {N} items spilling over from last week. Cut to top 6 by impact × decay. For each:
- Keep / Defer / Kill
- If defer: when, and what changes by then
- If kill: 1-line why it's safe to drop
- If keep: what was actually blocking it last week
Be willing to kill more than half.
{paste}8. Quarter → week roll-down
My quarterly OKR: {goal}. We're in week {N of Q}. What is the single highest-leverage thing this week to move the OKR? What's blocking that thing? What backup plan kicks in if I don't ship it by Friday? Be opinionated.9. Energy / capacity audit
Below is my realistic energy pattern this week (paste — sleep, travel, meetings, life events, low days). Match my planned outcomes (paste) against the energy I'll actually have. Flag any day where I've planned deep work into a meeting-stacked or low-energy slot. Suggest the swap.
Energy: {paste}
Plan: {paste}10. Maker-week protection
This week I want maker-mode dominant ({N} hours). Audit my current calendar (paste) and propose:
- Meetings to decline with a polite template
- Meetings to convert async
- Meetings to keep but shorten
- A "no internal meetings before {time}" rule for the week
Give me the actual decline language I can paste into Slack / email.
{paste calendar}11. Stakeholder communication plan
This week I'm shipping {outcome}. List the 4-6 people who care about progress. For each:
- What they need to know
- When they need to know it (Monday plan, mid-week pulse, Friday recap)
- The channel (DM, standup, weekly write-up)
- The one risk I should flag proactively before they ask
Output as a table.12. Pre-mortem the week
Imagine it's Friday and this week was a disaster. Below is my plan (paste). Write 5 specific failure modes:
- Outcome I missed and why
- Meeting that derailed a maker block
- Decision I avoided
- Person I didn't loop in
- The "small thing" that ate 6 hours
For each, what I'd do Monday morning to prevent it.
{paste plan}Common mistakes
- Confusing tasks with outcomes — completing tasks isn’t the same as shipping results
- Planning deep work into meeting-stacked days without checking the calendar
- Spillover that quietly carries forever — never killed, never triaged
- No Friday review — same mistakes repeat next week
- Optimistic capacity math (planning 50 hours into a 35-hour week)
Related
- Project planning prompts
- Task prioritization prompts
- Quarterly Planning Prompts: 12 Templates Beyond a Wish List
- Plan Your Side-Hustle Week With AI
- How to Use AI for Weekly Planning: Sunday Ritual, Daily Anchors, and Friday Review
Tags: #Prompt #Productivity #Weekly plan