When was the last time someone looked at your week and said, "Three of these meetings don't matter. You're ignoring your second biggest priority. And there's a decision you're avoiding that will cost you more every day you wait."
That's one of several things a Chief of Staff does. It's a six-figure role, and 80% of CEOs say hiring one transformed their effectiveness. Harvard Business School recently called the AI Chief of Staff one of the most promising use cases in leadership.
Let’s build it as a workflow you control. Starting with: strategic priority alignment.
🪞The Problem
Most leaders manage strategic focus one of three ways:
Level 1: Gut feel. You set priorities in January. By March you can't remember what they were. The calendar fills itself and the week happens to you.
Level 2: Periodic review. You check in on goals monthly or quarterly. Better, but the drift between reviews is where weeks get lost.
Level 3: Weekly alignment system. Every Monday, something compares your actual calendar against your stated priorities. Tells you where you're drifting, what to cut, what you're neglecting. You adjust before the week gets away from you.
Level 3 is where the leverage lives. It takes 15 minutes to set up and 10 minutes each Monday to run.
📚 Framework
This builds at the Intelligence layer of the AI Enablement OS. The pattern: a persistent AI workspace loaded with your strategic context, queried weekly against your calendar.
🛠️ This Week’s Build
Step 1: Gather your strategic context
Collect these in one place before you touch any tool:
Your Q1/annual goals and KPIs
Your org chart or key stakeholder list
Your current project list with status
Any strategic docs that define what success looks like this year
Solopreneur? Your "org chart" might be contractors or none. Your "KPIs" might be revenue, subscribers, or pipeline. Adjust the language. The framework works the same.
Step 2: Set up your workspace
Platform | Where to Set Up |
|---|---|
Claude | Projects > New Project > Add Knowledge |
ChatGPT | Projects > New Project > Add Files + Instructions |
Copilot | Notebook > New Notebook > Edit Copilot Instructions |
Gemini | Gems > New Gem > Add Instructions |
Name it "Chief of Staff." Load your context from Step 1.
Step 3: Paste your custom instructions
This turns a blank workspace into an actual Chief of Staff:
You are my AI Chief of Staff. Your role is to help me stay focused on what matters most, prepare me for decisions, and catch what I'm missing.
My strategic context:
Role: [Your title and what you're responsible for]
Q1 Priorities: [List your top 3-5 priorities]
Key Metrics: [The numbers you're measured on]
Team: [Who reports to you, who you report to]
Current Challenges: [What's keeping you up at night]
Your operating principles:
Always tie recommendations back to my stated priorities
Flag when my time allocation doesn't match my goals
Be direct. No hedging. I need honest assessment.
When presenting options, always include "do nothing"
as a baselineAsk clarifying questions before giving recommendations
if you need more context
Step 4: Run your first Weekly Priority Alignment Brief
Pull up your calendar for the week. Paste it into your Chief of Staff workspace with this prompt:
Here is my calendar and task list for this week:
[Paste your calendar and open items]
As my Chief of Staff, give me:
ALIGNMENT CHECK
Compare where I'm spending time this week against my Q1 priorities. Score each priority: Getting Attention, Drifting, or Neglected. Be specific about which meetings or tasks map to which priority, and which map to none.TOP 3 FOCUS AREAS
What three things will move the needle most this week? For each one, tell me why it matters more than everything else and what "done" looks like by Friday.DECLINE OR DELEGATE
Which meetings or tasks should I skip, shorten, or hand off? For each, tell me why it's lower priority and who could handle it instead. Be direct.PREP REQUIRED
Which meetings this week are high-stakes enough to need advance preparation? What should I walk in knowing?BLIND SPOTS
What am I not paying attention to that I should be, given my stated priorities? What's the thing I'll regret ignoring by Friday?
Copilot shortcut: On Microsoft 365 Copilot, open Copilot directly from your Outlook calendar view and paste the prompt. It reads your schedule without manual export.
What we just built: A strategic alignment system at the Intelligence layer. No agent. No automation. No code. A persistent AI workspace loaded with your priorities that you query against your calendar every Monday. 15 minutes to set up. 10 minutes each Monday to run. The kind of strategic support that used to require a dedicated hire, now available to any leader with an AI subscription.
🧭 Try This Week
Don't wait until Monday. Set up the workspace now. Then paste the Priority Alignment prompt with the rest of this week's calendar.
If it catches one misalignment, one meeting you should skip, or one priority you've been neglecting, it just paid for itself.
Know someone who needs a Chief of Staff but can't hire one?
Priority alignment is one of several core Chief of Staff capabilities you can build with AI. More to come.
How valuable was today’s issue for you?
↗︎ Think Better. Execute Faster.
See you next week. — Purti
Clarity Prompts The weekly AI operating system for sharper leaders. Workflows. Prompts. Tools.
