3 AI Prompts To Lighten Your Workload When You're Exhausted
Since January of this year, tens of thousands of American employees have been laid off. In 2025, major federal agencies including the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Department of Veteran Affairs are undergoing sweeping layoffs, with tens of thousands of government jobs being cut to reduce workforce size and restructure operations.
The tech industry has also seen over 22,000 layoffs this year, with companies like Meta, Microsoft, and Wayfair leading the downsizing. Additionally, corporations across various sectors—including Morgan Stanley, Starbucks, and Boeing—have also announced workforce reductions, reflecting widespread economic shifts.
Those who still have jobs are often under pressure to do more in the same amount of time. For workers juggling the demands of work with caretaking, caregiving, health challenges or burnout, the challenge becomes finding ways to streamline tasks and conserve energy. Luckily, you can use AI to identify places to find new efficiencies so you can do your work with less energy and effort.
No matter your situation, these targeted AI prompts can help you pinpoint inefficiencies, simplify your workflow, and reclaim valuable time for yourself.
When you first begin to think about all the different tasks you perform in a week, it can be daunting to figure out where you can trim the fat. Luckily, you can use your favorite AI tool to get you started. Ask it to give you ideas about what you can streamline in your work based on your job title. The more specific you are about your role, the more ideas it will generate for you.
Use this prompt to get started.
'What are three ways I can streamline my workflow as a [job title]
Once you understand areas where you can streamline your work, take it a step further by understanding how you can begin to batch your time around the newly identified streamlined tasks. As I write in The Rest Revolution, addressing our time is one of the five critical ways we can realign our lives to exit burnout. One great way to start realigning is through time batching.
Time batching refers to the act of grouping similar tasks together and dedicating blocks of time to those tasks. This helps improve your focus by reducing the context switching you'd experience when multitasking or performing different types of tasks in the same time period.
For example, instead of responding to customer emails, meeting with your direct reports. and working on a business development proposal all in the same morning, you may decide to spend a focused two hours on business development tasks like writing new proposals for all new business leads. This way you can speed through the proposals before moving on to your other work.
Try this prompt:
'You offered me 3 ways to streamline my workflow earlier. Which tasks should I batch together so I can be most productive?'
Once you have a new set of streamlined tasks, categories for task batching to reduce context switching, let AI develop a schedule for you to put all of this into practice.
Start with this prompt:
'Build me a sample weekly schedule I can use to bake in these new efficiencies.'
Depending on the response you receive, you can follow up with your LLM tool to get an even more specific response based on your unique situation. If you are exhausted or have reduced performance capacity due to a health challenge, caregiving responsibility or personal experience of burnout, you can plug in the following prompt to get an even more tailored schedule.
Follow-up prompt:
'You offered me a great schedule earlier. While I appreciate it, it feels ambitious as I'm on the brink of burnout. Can you build me a new schedule that accounts for my reduced energy levels?'
In a time when burnout, exhaustion, and reduced capacity are all too common, working smarter—not harder—is no longer optional. We simply can't afford to waste our limited energy on tasks that technology can help us simplify or streamline.
By using AI intentionally, we can offload some of the mental weight, protect our capacity, and save our energy for what truly matters—our health, our wellbeing, and the people we care about.
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