This is one of my favourite ways to use generative AI. I tend to have a lot of projects going at any one time and it’s very easy for things to get messy, foggy, jumbled up, and generally out of control. As a recovering (or not) control freak, using AI tools to turn brain dumps into organised frameworks has been a game changer.

There are dedicated tools for project management such as Notion, Jira, Monday, and Trello, all which have some sort of AI assistant embedded.

Then there are the AI workflow builders like Airtable, Make, and Zapier that aim to create connecting chains of tools to automate the tedious, repetitive parts of projects and project management.

And then you have one of my favourite tools of all time – Goblin Tools. This is for simpler, more routine to-do lists, which often take up too much room in our brains. You can check out my earlier post on Goblin Tools here.

To be honest though, when I’m at the start (or losing track) of a project and just need to get some order into the house, see what I’ve got, and what I’ve forgotten, I tend to just head straight back to one of the standard LLMs. Whether it’s Claude, Chat GPT, or Gemini.

My go-to prompt around this is some variant of:

I want to finish the first draft of my current novel by the end of June 2026. I’m currently about 3/4 of the way through but it’s going really slowly and I’m also stressing about the novella I should be doing a developmental edit on, and I’m beta reading a middle grade novel for a friend that needs to be back to them by the end of May. Plus I started a new job a month ago and my brain feels like it’s in overload. What information do you need from me to come up with a realistic project plan that ideally hits these deadline but allows for movement, given the other things I’ve got going on?

As with many of these AI chats, the real value comes when you answer the questions it will definitely throw up in response to a brief like this. I’ll work it through until I have something I can pull across into Notion – which happily turns markdown files into pages, complete with tick-box to-do lists.

A variant on this is the DIY writing retreat schedule creator I made a few months ago as a custom GPT and more recently updated into a Lovable app. These are essentially project planners, just with very specific guide-rails.

Project Management Prompts

Coming up with a project brief from a brain dump I’m not much of one for project briefs, I tend to just dive straight in, but for people actually working with other people on projects and needing clarity and buy-in? This could be helpful:

I’ve just had a kick-off meeting for a new project. Here are my rough notes: [paste notes/meeting transcript]. Please turn these into a structured project brief with: a summary, objectives, key deliverables, known risks or open questions, and suggested next steps. Please ask for any missing information.

Then coming up with a task list If you don’t want to use Goblin Tools…

I’m running a [type of project, e.g. website redesign / product launch / event]. Here’s my brief: [paste brief]. Please generate a detailed task list, grouped by phase, with suggested owners (use job titles like ‘Designer’, ‘Copywriter’ if I haven’t specified names) and rough time estimates.

Of course with that one, if you used an LLM for the initial brief, I’d just continue the conversation. That way you don’t have to re-brief things, unless there have been significant changes between the brain dump output and the brief after review rounds.

Status updates This is an area a lot of the project management tools are actively recruiting AI for (we use Asana at work and it’s very big on this). It does need checking – these tools don’t always understand which actions and events are important, and also tend to struggle with the concept of time unless you’re very clear.

Here’s what happened this week on my project: [paste bullet points, again, meeting transcripts can be useful here]. Please write a concise status update for a non-technical stakeholder. Include: what was completed, what’s in progress, any blockers, and next steps. Keep it to 150 words.