I used to juggle Notion, Todoist, RescueTime, Forest, a bullet journal, three browser extensions, and a whiteboard I never looked at.
Then I started building prompt packs — structured AI prompts for specific moments in my day. Six months later, I've consolidated my entire productivity system into ChatGPT conversations.
Here's what I replaced, what I use instead, and the one thing I didn't expect.
What I Actually Dropped
Notion → Prompt pack for weekly planning. I spent 45 minutes every Sunday maintaining a Notion workspace. Now I run through a 40-question weekly reset checklist that surfaces exactly what I need to know: what shipped, what stalled, and what changes this week. Takes 20 minutes. The structured questions caught patterns my free-form Notion notes never did — like the fact that 60% of my "urgent" tasks could have been batched on Monday morning.
Todoist → Workday prompt flow. Instead of maintaining a task list that grew faster than I could clear it, I now use a 20-prompt workday system that generates my actual daily plan from context. Standup prep, commit messages, PR descriptions, test case generation — each has a specific prompt. The "end-of-day shutdown" prompt alone replaced my anxious "did I forget something" scrolling habit.
Forest → Morning routine prompts. I still like the pomodoro concept, but the morning routine pack starts my day with something more valuable than focus time: intention. Five prompts for priority triage, energy mapping, and standup preparation. I run through them while my coffee brews.
Three browser extensions → Single content creation flow. As a dev who writes documentation and blog posts, I was using extensions for grammar checking, headline analysis, and readability scoring. The content creator prompt pack handles all of that: ideation, outlining, drafting, and self-editing. I went from publishing one article per month to three per week.
The Solopreneur Problem
The biggest gap was business strategy. As a solo founder, I needed prompts for market validation, pricing, customer communication, and growth — things no productivity app covers. The solopreneur prompt vault became my AI co-founder: 50 prompts covering the full spectrum of running a one-person business.
The One Thing I Didn't Expect
The evening prompts. I added a wind-down pack expecting it to be the least useful. Instead, it changed my sleep. The "three wins" prompt — where you identify three things that went well today — genuinely shifted how I think about progress. Bad days feel survivable when you can name three concrete wins, even small ones.
What I Still Keep
I kept one app: a simple text file for capturing random thoughts throughout the day. Everything else runs through prompts now. The system is lighter, faster, and more personalized because I can tweak prompts for exactly my context instead of adapting my workflow to an app's assumptions.
How to Build Your Own System
Start with one pack. The workday prompts are the most broadly useful — they cover the core mechanics of any developer's day. Add the morning routine if you struggle with intention-setting. Add the weekly reset if you want better retrospectives without the overhead.
All the packs are pay-what-you-want, so you can try the cheaper ones first. The full collection covers morning, workday, evening, weekly, content creation, freelancing, and solopreneurship.
The key insight: prompts aren't about AI replacing your thinking. They're about externalizing the mechanical parts of knowledge work — formatting, structuring, checking — so your actual brainpower goes to the hard problems that deserve it.
What productivity apps would you replace with AI prompts? I'm curious what other people's stacks look like.
All prompt packs mentioned are available on my store. They're pay-what-you-want because I think developer tools should be accessible.
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