SELF Someone who has just completed a demanding project and needs to recover without wasting the week or going straight back to high intensity 154 words
Design a Recovery Week After Burning Out on a Big Project
Not all depletion is the same. Cognitive exhaustion, emotional drain, and physical fatigue respond to different recovery approaches, and the instinct to just rest often addresses the wrong one. This first identifies the dominant type of depletion for a specific project and then designs a recovery week around it, with morning and evening anchors and the one rule that matters most.
I have just finished a major project or period of intense work and I feel depleted. The project was {PROJECT_TYPE} and it lasted approximately {DURATION}.
Design a structured recovery week that:
1. Opens with an honest assessment of what type of depletion I am experiencing: cognitive load (too much thinking), emotional load (too much people and decisions), physical load (too little sleep and movement), or a combination
2. Recommends a daily structure for the week that addresses the dominant depletion type, with specific morning and evening anchors
3. Identifies two or three specific activities proven to accelerate recovery for this type of depletion, and explains the mechanism
4. Sets one rule for what not to do in the recovery week, with a direct explanation of why that rule matters for this specific depletion profile
Do not prescribe a full schedule. Give me the principles and the anchors and let me fill in the rest. ⚠ human-in-the-loop: you are responsible for the results of using this prompt, not us.