If we all have the same number of hours in a week, why do some people seem able to squeeze so much more in?

Take Stephen King, a prolific writer known for churning out 2,000 words every single day, weekends and holidays not excepted. Or Marie Curie, who ran a lab and raised two daughters largely alone after her husband's death, and still became the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences.

Neither had extra hours, but they did have something even more powerful: a system. No one is that productive without one.

I’ve always been a big believer in using systems to make myself more efficient, whether it’s time boxing or batching similar tasks together so I'm not switching contexts ten times a day. As someone who values productivity, I’m finding all sorts of ways to use generative AI to get even more out of my days.

Here are a three prompts I’m using constantly.

Backwards Calendaring

There are few things I despise more than a full calendar or stacked to-do list where nothing actually gets accomplished. To me, a day crammed with fake work on throwaway items is a day wasted.

That doesn’t mean I don’t understand why people do it, though. Humans crave control; when we tick off an easy-to-achieve to-do list item, we’re rewarded with a........

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