How to Prioritize Your Week Without Sacrificing Creative Flow

You don’t need a productivity calendar. You just need a productive Tuesday!

Creative guilt is sneaky. One minute you’re brainstorming, the next you’re buried under a shame pile of half-finished ideas, wondering if professional project juggler is a viable job title.

There’s a folder on my drive called To Revisit, but it might as well be called “Projects I Avoid Making Eye Contact With.” Inside, there are three half-written book ideas, a digital product that’s 63% done, and a zine layout with notes like “FIX THIS?” scrawled in the margins.

Every time I sit down to start something new, that folder starts humming with quiet judgment. Not loud enough to derail me—just enough to make me hesitate, and instead of taking action, I do something ridiculous like tweaking the color scheme for my website again.

That’s the thing about creative work; It’s not the ideas that weigh us down. It’s the backlog, the guilt, or the mental tabs we keep open just in case we suddenly become the kind of person who finishes everything.

But this week, I didn’t finish everything. I just moved one thing forward.

• One art piece

• One post

• One edit

• One little checkbox

That’s the win. That’s what this week’s prompt is built for: To relieve the stress of impending doom by organizing and prioritizing your ideas while also giving you some grace for all the other stuff in your life.

Use this prompt first thing in the morning (or after a 20-minute Instagram scroll spiral). It will stop you spinning your wheels and choose only intentional actions, without pressure to do it all.

Prompt: One Small Thing That Moves It Forward

Copy all the text between the lines below, paste it into your AI of choice (I use ChatGPT 4o), and replace all the areas in brackets with your information.

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I need help organizing my week. Here’s a list of everything I’m currently working on:
[Insert messy list of tasks, meetings, deadlines, and open projects.]

Can you turn this into a clear, single-page checklist that:

• Organizes the tasks by urgency and importance

• Suggests what to drop, delegate, or delay

• Gives me three high-priority items to focus on each day this week

• Skips emojis and horizontal rules

• Formats the final result as a simple, structured checklist

Also, please ask any follow-up questions you need to make this more streamlined and less intimidating. The goal is to encourage productivity without adding stress or complexity.

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This basic prompt will help by transforming your chaos into clarity. If you want to go deeper, paid members gain access to the full prompt archive. Test it out for a week for free and watch your productivity soar!

Also, if you want to see below how this prompt worked for me? Consider becoming a member.

My Results

After running the prompt above and inserting my messy list of todos, this is what ChatGPT gave me back: