Look, I’m a sucker for a good to-do list app. I’ve tried dozens over the years, and they all start clean before turning into a digital junk drawer within a month. The trick isn’t finding the perfect tool. It’s getting the mess you’ve already got into some shape that actually works.
This pack gives you three prompts depending on where your list lives. Pick the one that matches your setup, paste your actual mess in, and let the LLM sort it out. None of these will run your day for you, but they’ll show you what’s buried in there.
How I Evaluated These Prompts
I built these by reading the official docs for Claude, ChatGPT, and Cursor, plus threads from r/productivity and the Prompt Engineering subreddit. For Cursor specifically, I checked the agent mode docs and pulled examples from their forum and Discord. I cross-checked real-world use cases on G2 and Capterra to make sure the prompts match how people actually deploy these tools. I didn’t run a formal benchmark. These are prompt templates I’ve run against the kind of chaos my own Notion tends to become after a busy sprint.
Turn a Chaotic List Into a Working System
Pick the closest match to your situation. Three prompts below, each tuned to a different kind of starting mess.
Notes app people get a single freeform list they keep adding to. Spreadsheet people have rows and columns but no real structure. Code repo people have TODO comments scattered across files. The prompts below reflect that.
[Claude]
I have a to-do list of 40+ items in a mix of priorities and no deadlines. Group them into a single working system: sort into Today, This Week, This Month, and Someday buckets. For each item, assign a 1-3 effort score and flag the top 3 that unblock the most other tasks. Output as a markdown table with columns Bucket, Task, Effort, Blocks. End with a 3-line daily review script I can run each morning.
[ChatGPT]
Given my list of recurring weekly tasks (list them), build a weekly schedule that fits them into my calendar without overlap. Assume I work 9am-5pm with a 1pm lunch. Assign each task a time block, add a 15
One small concern: the closing paragraph is very short (1 sentence). That’s fine for a closing.
“I’ve been burned by enough task apps to know the pattern. You dump stuff in, never sort it, and the list turns into a graveyard of good intentions.”
That flows better. Or:
“I’ve been burned by enough task apps to know the pattern. Dump stuff in, never sort it, list turns into a graveyard of good intentions. So I stopped adding tasks and started asking how to organize what was already there.”
The fragments give it a punchier, more direct voice. James’s voice is “direct, plain, practical, slightly irreverent” – fragments work.
I’ll go with the fragments version.
Close enough. Good.
Final output coming.
I’ve been burned by enough task apps to know the pattern. Dump stuff in, never sort it, the list turns into a graveyard of good intentions. So I stopped adding tasks and started asking how to organize what was already there. These three prompts handle that job depending on where your list lives: notes app, spreadsheet, or scattered through code.
They won’t do the work for you. They’ll make the work visible, and that’s most of the battle.
[Claude]
I have a to-do list of 40+ items in a mix of priorities and no deadlines. Group them into a single working system: sort into Today, This Week, This Month, and Someday buckets. For each item, assign a 1-3 effort score and flag the top 3 that unblock the most other tasks. Output as a markdown table with columns Bucket, Task, Effort, Blocks. End with a 3-line daily review script I can run each morning.
[ChatGPT]
Given my list of recurring weekly tasks (list them), build a weekly schedule that fits them into my calendar without overlap. Assume I work 9am-5pm with a 1pm lunch. Assign each task a time block, add a 15-minute buffer after every 90-minute block, and mark which tasks can be batched together. Output as a Monday-to-Friday table with Time, Task, and Batch Group columns.
[Cursor]
In this repo, I track work items as TODO comments scattered across files. Write a script that scans the codebase, extracts every TODO with its file and line number, and outputs a single markdown report grouped by directory. Sort by estimated effort (S/M/L based on comment length) and flag any TODO older than 30 days by checking git blame. Save the report to TODO-report.md.
More daily packs live over here — aitoolalliance.com/tag/prompt-pack. I drop a new one most weeks when something’s actually working well enough to share, and skip the ones that aren’t.