Most senior professionals plan their week the same way they did in 2008. A list on a notepad, a quick scan of the calendar, a coffee, then the inbox swallows the morning.
There is a small upgrade that takes eleven minutes and replaces the planning meeting you would have called instead. Five prompts, in order, before you open email.
Prompt 1 — the weekly map
Here is what is on my calendar this week: [paste]. Here are the open matters / clients / engagements: [list]. Produce a one-page map: where I should be focused on Monday and Tuesday, where Wednesday lands, and what should be protected for Thursday and Friday. Conservative, not aspirational. Cut anything that does not justify a senior calendar slot.
You will receive a calmer version of your week. You will not follow it exactly. That is fine. You will follow more of it than you would have without it.
Prompt 2 — top three risks
Across the matters / clients listed above, identify the three things that could go wrong this week if I do not give them attention by Wednesday. For each: the risk, the small action that prevents it, the latest day to act.
This prompt does what your best partner does on a Sunday evening, except faster and without the call.
Prompt 3 — the follow-up audit
From this list of recent client communications [paste subjects and dates], identify which threads I owe a reply to, in priority order, with a one-line note on what each reply should confirm or move forward.
This is the prompt that has the largest revenue effect, in our experience. The threads you owe a reply to are almost always the threads where the client is waiting to decide something.
Prompt 4 — the calendar audit
Here is my calendar [paste]. Identify any meeting that, on a five-minute scan, does not justify a senior calendar slot. For each: why it might be skippable, what could replace it, the polite decline language.
You will not skip them all. You will skip three. Three a week is a quarter of a day a quarter. Compounded.
Prompt 5 — the partner line
In one sentence, what is the one thing my team / firm / partners should know about my week. Plain language. No jargon.
You paste this into Slack, or you send it as a Monday morning email to two people. You will be amazed at how often the act of writing this changes the week.
The printable prompt pack.
Members get all five prompts as a one-page printable, plus the version for owners with no team, the version for partners running a desk, and a saved Claude project preset that runs them in order.
The discipline part
This pack is not magical. It works because you sit with it for eleven minutes before email. If you run the prompts after email, you will get half the value. The order matters. The morning matters.
Run it for four Mondays. By the fifth, you will resent the Monday you did not.
Filed under Tools · The Leverage Years · Vol. I, Issue 03.