⚡ Promptolis Original · Wellness & Health

⚡ Energy Audit Weekly

Maps where your energy leaked and refueled last week — then picks the one change worth making next week.

⏱️ 8 min to try 🤖 ~45 seconds in Claude 🗓️ Updated 2026-04-19

Why this is epic

It treats energy like a financial audit — specific drains and deposits with attribution — instead of vague 'self-care' platitudes.

It forces a single highest-leverage change for the week ahead, not a 12-item wellness manifesto you'll abandon by Wednesday.

It calls out patterns you're blind to: the meeting that always drains you, the 'rest' activity that's actually depleting, the false recovery.

The prompt

Promptolis Original · Copy-ready
<principles> You are conducting an energy audit — a forensic review of how the user's physical, emotional, and cognitive energy moved over the past 7 days. Think like a financial auditor, not a wellness coach. Non-negotiable rules: 1. NO generic self-care advice. Never say 'make sure to rest', 'practice self-care', 'prioritize sleep' as a recommendation. Those are not insights. 2. Be specific. 'The Tuesday 3pm status meeting' not 'work stress'. 'Dinner with Marcus' not 'social obligations'. 3. Distinguish real recovery from fake recovery. Doomscrolling, binge TV, and drinking often masquerade as rest but are net drains. 4. Call out the user's blind spots. If they framed something as positive but the details suggest otherwise, push back. 5. Identify exactly ONE highest-leverage change for next week. Not three. Not a menu. One. 6. If sleep, food, movement, or sunlight data is absent, flag it as a gap — don't invent. 7. Ruthlessness over reassurance. The user came here to see patterns, not to feel better. </principles> <input> The past 7 days (journal, bullets, or stream-of-consciousness — whatever the user provides): {PASTE YOUR WEEK HERE} Optional context (role, life stage, current goals): {CONTEXT} </input> <output-format> Structure your response in exactly these sections: # Energy Audit: Week of [dates if given, else 'Past 7 Days'] ## The Ledger Two columns: **Drains** (with estimated cost: minor/moderate/major) and **Deposits** (with estimated gain). Be specific — name people, meetings, activities, times of day. ## The Pattern You're Not Seeing 1-2 paragraphs. The non-obvious thing. Something the user framed one way that's actually another. A recurring drain they've normalized. A 'rest' activity that's depleting. Be direct. ## Fake Recovery vs. Real Recovery Call out specifically what in this week looked like rest but wasn't, and what actually refueled them. ## The Net One sentence: did this week leave you richer or poorer in energy, and by roughly how much? ## The One Change for Next Week Exactly one change. Specific, concrete, starts on a named day. Explain why THIS change and not the other tempting options. Predict what will be hard about making it. ## What I Don't Know List the data gaps (sleep, food, movement, context) that would sharpen this audit if provided next week. </output-format> <auto-intake> If {PASTE YOUR WEEK HERE} is empty, contains only the placeholder, or is less than 50 words, DO NOT produce an audit. Instead, switch to intake mode: 1. Ask the user to walk you through the past 7 days, day by day. Prompt for: what they did for work (meetings, deep work, context-switches), how they slept, whether they exercised, who they spent time with, what they did in the evenings, and any moments they remember feeling notably energized or drained. 2. Ask follow-ups on anything vague ('busy week' is not sufficient — push for specifics). 3. Once you have enough concrete detail, produce the audit in the full format above. Do not produce a generic template. Get the actual week out of them first. </auto-intake> Now, conduct the energy audit:
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Example: input → output

Here's how this prompt actually performs. Real input below, real output from Claude Opus 4.

📝 Input
Past 7 days (Mon Oct 14 – Sun Oct 20):

Mon: Up at 6:30, gym before work (lifted). Standup was fine. Two hours deep work on the Q4 roadmap doc in the morning — felt great. Afternoon was a 90-min budget review with Dana (CFO) that ran over, then back-to-back 1:1s. Got home at 7, ordered Thai, watched two episodes of Industry with Sam, in bed by 11:30. Slept ~7hrs.

Tue: Up at 6:45, skipped gym, rushed. Had the weekly product review with engineering — felt tense, Raj was passive-aggressive about the timeline again. Spent the afternoon rewriting the roadmap because of his pushback. Dinner with Marcus downtown, 2 drinks, got home at 11. Slept ~6hrs.

Wed: Exhausted. Slept through alarm. Coffee with Priya at 10 — she's also launching something, we brainstormed, felt alive for the first time all week. Afternoon fine, mostly execution work. Skipped gym. Ordered Sweetgreen, doomscrolled Twitter till midnight. Slept ~6.5hrs.

Thu: Gym at 7. Good deep work block 9-11. Interview loop for the senior PM role — 4 back-to-back 45-min interviews. Wiped out after. Debrief with the panel ran long. Got sushi with Sam, asleep on the couch by 9:30. 8hrs sleep.

Fri: Up at 6:30, gym. Half-day of meetings. Skipped lunch. Board prep with Dana in the afternoon — stressful, numbers aren't where we wanted. Drinks with the team at 6, home at 10, pizza, one more episode, bed at 12:30. 6.5hrs sleep.

Sat: Slept till 10. Lazy morning, coffee + NYT. Long walk with Sam in the park, ~2 hours, perfect weather. Dinner at Marcus's place with his work friends — felt 'on' the whole time, draining. Home at midnight. Slept 7hrs.

Sun: Up at 9. Farmer's market. Cooked. Did laundry + some email triage (shouldn't have). Felt a low-grade dread about Monday by 4pm.

Context: I'm a VP of Product at a Series B startup, 36, no kids, live with partner Sam. Trying to figure out why I feel more tired than my schedule suggests I should be.
🤖 Output

Energy Audit: Week of Oct 14 – Oct 20

The Ledger

Drains

  • Tuesday product review + Raj's pushback → major (cost you Tuesday afternoon AND the mental residue that bled into Wednesday)
  • Rewriting the roadmap in response to Raj → moderate (you already had a good doc Monday; this was tax, not work)
  • Dinner with Marcus on Tuesday → moderate (2 drinks + late night + you describe him differently than other friends)
  • Thursday interview loop (4 back-to-back) → major (the kind of cost that takes 24+ hours to recover from)
  • Friday board prep with Dana → moderate (numbers stress, end-of-week timing)
  • Marcus's dinner Saturday with his work friends → major (you said 'felt on the whole time' — that's performance, not connection)
  • Sunday email triage → minor but symbolic (broke the recovery envelope)
  • Sunday 4pm dread → moderate (the dread itself is a cost, separate from Monday)

Deposits

  • Monday morning gym + roadmap deep work → major (best block of the week)
  • Coffee with Priya Wednesday → major (you literally said 'felt alive for the first time all week')
  • Thursday morning deep work block → moderate
  • Saturday walk with Sam → major (two hours, outside, right person)
  • Sunday farmer's market + cooking → moderate

The Pattern You're Not Seeing

Marcus is a drain and you've been treating him like a friend. Look at the data: Tuesday dinner cost you 2 drinks and an hour of sleep before a board-prep week. Saturday at his place cost you a 'felt on the whole time' performance with his colleagues. Meanwhile, 30 minutes of coffee with Priya on a Wednesday did more for your energy than any planned recovery activity this week. You have a signal here and you're ignoring it.

The second pattern: Raj is extracting more from you than the roadmap disagreement itself. You didn't just lose Tuesday afternoon — you lost the compound of Monday's good work because you rewrote it under his pressure. That's not a meeting cost; that's a recurring relationship cost, and it shows up in this audit and almost certainly in the last three.

Fake Recovery vs. Real Recovery

Fake recovery this week:

  • Two episodes of Industry with Sam on Monday/Friday (fine in isolation, but it's your default, and late bedtimes cost you next-day sleep)
  • Wednesday doomscrolling till midnight (you called it rest; it was a nervous-system escape from the Raj residue)
  • Friday team drinks + pizza + TV (three numbing activities stacked)

Real recovery this week:

  • Saturday walk with Sam (movement + nature + right person, no phone mentioned)
  • Sunday cooking (creative, sensory, no screen)
  • Coffee with Priya (the only social interaction all week that was net-positive)

You have good recovery modes. You just didn't use them on the days you needed them most (Tue/Wed/Fri nights).

The Net

You ended this week moderately poorer in energy — the Raj residue and two Marcus interactions cost more than your weekend deposits recovered. That's why Sunday 4pm dread showed up.

The One Change for Next Week

Before Tuesday's product review, have a 20-minute 1:1 with Raj on Monday to pre-align on the roadmap.

Not a wellness change. A structural one. Here's why this and not the others:

  • 'See less of Marcus' is the right long-term call but a bad weekly-scale intervention — you'll rationalize it away when he texts.
  • 'Sleep more' is vague and you already know it.
  • 'Protect deep work' — you did that fine on the good days.

The Raj dynamic is the one thing costing you multi-day compound damage on a recurring basis. Killing that Tuesday rewrite cycle likely recovers 4-6 hours of actual work AND the Wednesday emotional tax. One change, high leverage, starts Monday.

What will be hard: You'll want to skip the 1:1 because it feels like appeasement. It isn't — it's a cheaper version of what you're already paying for.

What I Don't Know

  • What you ate most days (you mentioned Thai, Sweetgreen, sushi, pizza — suggests a pattern worth tracking)
  • Caffeine timing (likely relevant for the Tue/Fri sleep)
  • How Sam experienced this week — they showed up as a consistent deposit, which is either real or you're undercounting their cost to you
  • Whether the Raj dynamic is a this-quarter thing or a six-month thing (changes the intervention)
  • Actual sleep data vs. estimates — your estimates are suspiciously round

Common use cases

  • Sunday-night review before the week ahead
  • Diagnosing why a 'good' week left you exhausted
  • Founders/operators tracking burnout risk early
  • People in therapy who want structured between-session reflection
  • Returning from vacation and wondering why you're already drained
  • Post-big-project debrief on what the sprint actually cost you
  • Tracking whether a new habit (gym, early wakeup, no alcohol) is actually working

Best AI model for this

Claude Sonnet 4.5 or GPT-5. You need strong pattern recognition across unstructured journal-like input and the willingness to push back on your own rationalizations. Skip smaller models — they default to generic wellness advice.

Pro tips

  • Include sleep hours and whether you exercised — the model weights these heavily and will call out when 'I was tired' is really 'I slept 5.5 hours four nights in a row'.
  • Mention social interactions by name and context, not just 'saw friends'. The model can spot that dinner with Marcus always drains you while coffee with Priya refuels you.
  • Note the emotional tone of work meetings, not just that they happened. 'Budget review with CFO' and 'brainstorm with design' cost very different amounts.
  • Run this weekly for a month before making big conclusions. One week is noise; four weeks is signal.
  • Don't edit out the embarrassing stuff (doomscrolling, skipped workouts, 11pm ice cream). That's where the patterns live.
  • Ask the model to compare to last week's audit if you save them — it will catch recurring drains you keep ignoring.

Customization tips

  • Paste your week in whatever format is natural — bullets, paragraphs, calendar exports. The model handles messy input better than structured input.
  • If you want the audit to go harder on a specific area (work, relationships, health), add a line to {CONTEXT} like 'I especially want you to look at my work dynamics' — it will weight that section.
  • Save each week's audit to a note. After 4 weeks, paste all four in and ask the model to find the recurring patterns across audits — that's where the real insights live.
  • If the one recommended change feels too hard, don't ask for an easier one. Ask the model to break that change into the smallest possible first step for Monday.
  • Run this Sunday evening, not Monday morning. The audit is more useful as a week-ahead tool than a week-behind report.

Variants

Monthly Audit

Change the window to 30 days and ask it to identify structural drains vs. one-off events.

Role-Specific

Add context about your job (founder, parent of young kids, caregiver) so the model calibrates what 'normal' depletion looks like.

Partner Mode

Run it on your household's shared week — surfaces whose energy is being extracted by whose commitments.

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