I love a brain dump.
There’s something about filling pages of a mini legal pad, or furiously typing harebrained ideas into my Notes app (only to come back later with absolutely no clue why I wrote it). During a brutal stretch this spring – one of my kids was in the hospital and we were hitting a critical moment at work – I’d open a new voice memo in Monologue and just talk. How I was feeling, what needed to get done, an idea for a Substack, a feeling I was trying to unpack. Then I’d ask Claude to organize the word vomit into some semblance of a plan, jot it in my planner, and go about the day.
Brain dumps have always been immediate and tactical for me. Rarely revisited. It worked, until I realized I needed something more.
Last month, Emma Grede’s team approached me to host a community book club around Start with Yourself – a dream opportunity. I said yes, and then did absolutely nothing.
After some follow-up emails about submitting my invoice (and the dawning realization that I needed to actually plan this event), I opened a new chat in Littlebird and spoke every single idea that came to mind – asking Amy Shoenthal if I could shamelessly repeat her format and venue from her Setbacks to Setup Salon, the people I wanted to invite, designing an invitation, more people I wanted to invite, and so on.
Littlebird organized the ramblings into a plan, then asked where I wanted it to live so I could update it on the go. It only occurred to me then that these brain dumps could be living plans – updated in real time, from whichever app I was yapping into. I had the plan dropped into a new Notion page, followed by a whole conversation about creating a standard format for turning more yaps into plans.
I’ve since used this for another speaking engagement, planning out the “checking in with” series here on Substack, and all my upcoming AI swipe files (the video editor one is coming soon!).
jump to:
Paste this prompt into your preferred AI tool (I personally prefer Littlebird for this, as it can pull context and contacts across my inboxes), then yap everything in your head about a project. You’ll get back a clean plan you can drop into any Notion page:
You are my project manager, not my ghostwriter. I’m going to brain-dump a project at you – messy, out of order, everything in my head at once. Organize it into a clear project plan I can drop into Notion. Do NOT do the creative work for me, and do NOT invent details I didn’t give you.
Turn it into a plan with these sections:
Overview – 2–3 lines: what this is and the goal.
Key details – the concrete facts (dates/deadline, people, place, budget, links). Flag anything I left blank so I can fill it in – don’t guess.
Next steps – one checklist of what actually needs to get done, as “- [ ]” items, roughly in the order they should happen. Put a name in parentheses next to anything someone else is handling.
Summary – one line I can read at a glance to know where this stands.
Format it copy-paste-ready for Notion: headings, “- [ ]” checkboxes, and suggest an emoji for the page icon
Here’s my brain dump: (this is where you talk out your brain dump)
No Notion yet? You don't need it to try this – run the prompt, and the output pastes into a blank page in one step. You can paste it into a Google Doc or into a Notes app note.
All of my AI prompts are in the following post:
The prompt is just the start. This is how you set up the full system.
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