Every Monday morning, I used to spend two hours doing the same thing: reviewing my calendar, drafting follow-up emails from the previous week, and prepping talking points for upcoming meetings.
It was necessary work. It was also mind-numbing.
Now I do it in 15 minutes. Here's exactly how.
The Problem: Death by Admin Work
If you're like most professionals, your actual job — the stuff you were hired to do — gets squeezed between endless admin tasks. Email follow-ups. Meeting prep. Status updates. Documentation.
None of it is hard. All of it takes time.
I tracked my Monday morning routine for a month. The breakdown:
- 45 minutes reviewing last week's meetings and drafting follow-up emails
- 30 minutes looking at this week's calendar and writing prep notes
- 25 minutes updating my task list and prioritizing
- 20 minutes drafting a weekly status update for my team
Two hours. Every single Monday. Before I even started my real work.
The Solution: One AI Prompt, Run Weekly
I built a single workflow that handles 80% of this automatically. It's not fancy. It doesn't require any special tools beyond an AI assistant (I use Claude, but ChatGPT works too) and about 15 minutes of your time.
Here's the exact process:
Step 1: The Brain Dump (5 minutes)
At the end of each day, I spend 60 seconds jotting quick notes in a running doc. Just bullet points:
- Met with Sarah re: Q2 planning — she needs budget numbers by Friday
- Design review pushed to Thursday
- Finished first draft of onboarding guide
- James mentioned concerns about timeline
That's it. No formatting. No complete sentences. Just enough to jog my memory.
Step 2: The Monday Prompt (10 minutes)
Monday morning, I paste my week's notes into Claude with this prompt:
The Prompt:
You're my executive assistant helping me start the week organized. Here are my rough notes from last week:
[PASTE NOTES HERE]
Please create:Follow-up emails — Draft brief, professional follow-up emails for anyone who needs one. Keep them warm but concise.This week's priorities — Based on what I noted, what are the 3-5 things I should focus on this week? Flag anything that seems time-sensitive.Meeting prep notes — For any meetings I mentioned, give me 2-3 talking points or questions I should bring.Team update — Write a casual 3-4 sentence status update I could share with my team about what's in progress.
Keep everything brief and actionable. I don't need perfection, I need a starting point I can quickly edit.
Step 3: Edit and Send (5-10 minutes)
The AI gives me drafts. I scan them, tweak anything that needs my voice, and hit send.
The key phrase in that prompt: "I don't need perfection, I need a starting point I can quickly edit."
That's the mindset shift. You're not asking AI to do your job. You're asking it to get you 70% of the way there so you can sprint through the last 30%.
Why This Works
Three reasons:
1. It removes the blank page problem.
The hardest part of writing any email is starting. When you already have a draft — even an imperfect one — editing is fast. Your brain shifts from "create mode" to "refine mode," which takes way less energy.
2. It catches things you'd forget.
Last week, my notes mentioned a teammate's concern about a timeline. I'd completely forgotten by Monday. The AI flagged it as a priority. That's the kind of thing that slips through the cracks when you're relying on memory alone.
3. It compounds over time.
Two hours saved every Monday is 100+ hours a year. That's two and a half full work weeks. What would you do with that time back?
Try It This Week
You don't need to build a complicated system. Start here:
- Today: Create a simple doc called "Weekly Notes"
- This week: Spend 60 seconds at the end of each day adding bullet points
- Next Monday: Run the prompt above
That's it. Fifteen minutes of setup. Fifteen minutes each Monday going forward.
The goal isn't to automate your job. It's to automate the parts of your job that drain you so you can focus on the parts that actually matter.
What workflow would you automate if you could? Reply and let me know — your idea might become a future post.