New book from the authors of Smart Brevity: Simplify: Do 50% More With 50% Less. Available September 15. Order your copy
You read Simplify. This is how you run it, inside the AI assistant you already have open.
Sixteen prompts, lifted from the book by Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen and Roy Schwartz. Paste one in and your assistant goes to work on your actual week rather than a hypothetical one.
One of the sixteen, in full, with nothing held back and nothing to fill in. Copy it, paste it into your assistant, and read what comes back before you decide whether the other fifteen are worth an email address.
Play the role of my toughest boss. Look at how I spent my week and tell me what I'm wasting time on.
Read the past week from my calendar yourself. Be specific about individual meetings, and name the ones a tough boss would have cancelled.
First name, last name, email. That is the whole form, and all 16 prompts open right here on this page.
Most people finish a book about working differently and change nothing. Not because they disagreed with it. Because Monday arrives with the same calendar, the same inbox and no obvious first move.
That gap is the whole reason this pack exists. Each prompt takes one idea from Simplify and turns it into a single instruction you can paste into an assistant in about ten seconds. There is no new tool to learn and no workflow to redesign. You already have the assistant open.
They also do the part people avoid. Almost every AI prompt in circulation asks a model to make something. These ask it to look at your week and tell you what to stop. One asks your assistant to play your toughest boss. One asks which three things you could drop that nobody would miss. One writes the decline email you have been putting off for a month.
That is the difference between a book you liked and a week that looks different.
The pack follows the book's own order, and the groups are the book's four moves. You do not have to run them in sequence. Most people start wherever the week hurts most.
4 prompts
Point the assistant at how you actually spent the week, then let it tell you what it sees. One of these is the free prompt above.
4 prompts
Kill the recurring meeting, the standing invite and the report that survive only because nobody has looked at them in a year.
2 prompts
Separate the work only you can do from the work you keep doing out of habit, then hand the second list over.
4 prompts
Spend the hours you got back on the thinking you were hired for, with the assistant as a sparring partner.
The last two are standing instructions rather than one-off asks. You paste them once as a system prompt, or save them as a custom assistant, and they stay in place. One of them interrogates every new commitment before it reaches your calendar.
The prompts are plain text. They run in Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini and Microsoft Copilot, and in anything else that takes a written instruction.
Several of them ask your assistant to read your calendar, your mail or your documents rather than making you paste anything in. Connect those tools first and it does the gathering itself. Where a prompt carries a bracket, like [add your idea here], that is the one part only you have. Replace it before you send.
Nothing you type into an assistant passes through this page.
Simplify: Do 50% More With 50% Less, by Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen and Roy Schwartz, is published by Crown Currency on September 15, 2026. It is where every one of these prompts came from, and where you find out what to do with the answer once your assistant hands it back.
If your organization wants to run the method as a group rather than alone, our coaches take teams through the same tools.
