How Do I Use AI to Be More Productive? Here Are 7 Prompts I Actually Use

Most "AI productivity" advice is garbage. It's people telling you to ask ChatGPT to write your emails, then acting like you've entered a new dimension of human potential.

That's not productivity. That's autocomplete with extra steps.

Real productivity from AI looks different. It looks like compressing decisions that used to take a week into a thirty-minute conversation. It looks like spotting the holes in your plan before a customer or competitor finds them for you. It looks like cutting the 80% of your to-do list that doesn't actually move the needle.

Below are seven prompts I keep on hand. I built them out of habits I picked up from years of enterprise sales and running real businesses — frameworks like premortems, Pareto analysis, and red teaming that consultants charge real money to walk executives through. AI lets you run them yourself, in minutes, for free.

Save these. Steal them. Modify them. They work in Claude or ChatGPT.

1. /DeepThinking — Slow the model down before it answers

Prefix your prompt with: Deep Thinking:

What this does: it tells the model to reason through every layer of the problem before it gives you an answer. Most people fire off a one-line prompt and accept the first thing that comes out. That's like asking a senior advisor a complex question and accepting whatever they blurt out in the first three seconds.

Use it when: you're working through strategy, pricing, positioning, or any decision where being slightly wrong costs you real money.

2. /RedTeam — Find the holes before someone else does

Prompt: Red team this. Analyze the idea and identify weaknesses before competitors do.

In sales, "red teaming" is when you pretend to be the buyer's procurement team trying to kill your own deal. Same idea here. You hand the AI your offer, your landing page, your pricing, your value prop — and you tell it to attack.

What you get back is the list of objections, weak claims, and credibility gaps you would have eventually heard from a prospect, a competitor, or a snarky comment section. Better to find them now.

3. /Pareto — Cut 80% of the work

Prompt: Apply the Pareto principle. Identify the 20% of actions that drive 80% of the results.

Pareto's a hundred-year-old idea: roughly 20% of inputs produce 80% of outputs. Most business owners know this. Almost none of them act on it, because identifying which 20% is the hard part.

Hand the AI your task list, your marketing channels, your offer stack, your client roster — and ask it to Pareto the thing. You'll usually find you've been spending half your week on stuff that contributes about 5% to the outcome.

4. /Premortem — Imagine the plan already failed

Prompt: Run a premortem. Assume this plan has already failed. Walk me through why, then tell me how to fix it before it ships.

This one's stolen from Gary Klein, a research psychologist who studies how experts make decisions. A postmortem happens after the funeral. A premortem happens before — you assume the patient died, and you work backwards to figure out what killed them.

Apply this to a launch, a campaign, a hire, a product, a new offer. The model will tell you the boring, predictable reasons your plan is going to fall apart. Fix those, and your odds of shipping something that actually works go up dramatically.

5. /Hook10 — Ten opening hooks in thirty seconds

Prompt: Generate 10 opening hooks for a [short / video / email / blog post / ad] about [topic].

This is the prompt I use most as a content creator. Hooks are the single highest-leverage thing in short-form content — get the first three seconds wrong and nothing else matters. Get them right and the rest of the script can be decent and still go viral.

Instead of staring at a blinking cursor trying to invent the perfect line, ask for ten. Pick the best one. Most of them will be bad. One or two will be better than what you would have written alone in twenty minutes.

6. /Viral — Optimize for engagement, not vanity

Prompt: Rewrite and optimize this for maximum engagement. Tell me what to change in the hook, pacing, and CTA, and explain why.

The honest version of this prompt is: stop letting AI write your content. Let AI critique your content. Give it your draft, ask it to optimize for engagement, and force it to explain its reasoning. You learn faster, your voice stays intact, and you stop publishing content that sounds like a robot wrote it. Because, well…

7. /Ultrathink — Maximum quality, single switch

Prefix your prompt with: Ultrathink:

Same idea as Deep Thinking, but turned up another notch. You're telling the model: I don't care about speed. I care about output quality. Take your time. Reason carefully. Don't give me the surface-level answer.

I use this when I'm working on something the customer is actually going to see — a sales page, a video script, a pricing page, a long-form post. The kind of stuff where one extra hour of thinking on the front end saves a week of redoing it on the back end.

The real takeaway

You don't need fifty prompts. You need three or four that you actually use, plugged into the decisions and tasks that matter most.

The mistake most people make is treating AI like a faster typist. It's not. It's a faster thinker. The leverage isn't in how quickly it writes your email — it's in how quickly it can stress-test your strategy, surface what you're missing, and help you cut the 80% of work that doesn't move the business forward.

Try one of these this week. Pick the one that maps to whatever you're stuck on right now and run it. That's where productivity actually comes from — not the tool, but the question you point it at.