At first, I used the prompt “Help me manage my time”, where Deepseek gave me a super interesting result combining different strategies that I can use:
- Clarity: Decide What Matters
Before planning how to spend time, know what you’re optimizing for.
The 80/20 Rule: What 20% of your tasks give you 80% of your results (or fulfillment)? Identify those 1–3 things.
The 3–3–3 Method: Each day, plan:
3 hours on your most important project (deep work).
3 shorter urgent tasks (meetings, emails, admin).
3 maintenance tasks (exercise, chores, learning).
- Structure: Plan with Intention
Don’t just react to what’s loudest. Use time blocking.
Time Blocking: Open your calendar. Assign specific blocks of time for deep work, shallow work, and breaks. Treat these blocks as non-negotiable appointments.
Batch Similar Tasks: Do all your calls in one block, all your email in one block. Context switching is a silent time-killer.
The Night Before: Spend 10 minutes each evening planning the next day. It saves hours of morning indecision.
- Execution: Protect Your Focus
The best plan fails without execution discipline.
Single-Task: When working, focus on one thing. Close unrelated tabs, put your phone in another room.
Manage Energy, Not Just Time: Are you a morning person? Do your hardest work then. Low-energy after lunch? Schedule admin tasks or a walk.
Use a “Done” List: At the end of the day, list what you did accomplish. This builds momentum and prevents the feeling of “I got nothing done.”
- Recovery: Avoid Burnout
Time management isn’t about maximizing every minute. It’s about sustainability.
Schedule Breaks: Use techniques like Pomodoro (25 min work, 5 min break) or simply ensure you take a 5–10 minute break every 90 minutes.
Define Shutdown: Have a clear end to your workday. A ritual (like closing your laptop or changing clothes) signals to your brain that work is done.
These are all useful, however no exact instruction of what “I should really do”, it even told me what matters the most but by not understanding what the most important thing is, because I did not provide other information but jsut to tell me how to manage my time.
Where the other prompt that I used, which is “I am a Junior college student, now I feel like my task is really difficult and I usually sleep around 12. Please help me with my time management when my average out of class time is 4pm.”, worked much better to give actual timetable to follow, tho, still not having other deeper intel because I did not provide any:
Summary of Your New Schedule:
Time Activity
4:00 – 4:15 Transition / Snack / Walk
4:15 – 5:30 HARDEST TASK (Phone away, deep focus)
5:30 – 7:00 Dinner + True Break (No work)
7:00 – 9:00 Easy tasks, review, organization
9:00 – 10:30 Shutdown routine / Wind down
10:30 In bed, lights low, no screens
11:00 Asleep
In this prompt, I used the suggestions from UT Guide:
To get your desired output, it is important to be specific about what that output should look like. When crafting a prompt, remember to try and incorporate these three things:
- Who the author is
- Who the audience is
- What the purpose is
- Example: “please generate a guide written from the perspective of a hiring manager communicating standards of professional attire in a business-casual setting to a group of newly hired student interns”
Which, I did include all these basic components and AI did provide a more specific answer.
This is interesting, as when I worked with Copilot, it also gets the most out of the LLM when you get as specific as possible with the prompt. Additionally, it is very beneficial when amending your prompt to use prompt patterns in getting the most out of the LLM and its output becoming useful to what you want.