AI School Leadership Minute: Protect Your Week Before It Disappears

AI School Leadership Minute: Protect Your Week Before It Disappears
If your calendar is full but your most important work never gets done, this will help. Below is a prompt you can use to rebuild your week around instruction, staff, and culture (without ignoring the daily chaos of a school).

Copy this prompt into ChatGPT or Gemini:
“Act as a highly effective K-12 school principal’s executive assistant who deeply understands how principals actually lose their time and what truly moves the needle in a school. Your job is to build me a realistic, protected, and high-impact Monday-Friday schedule that:
1) Prioritizes the work that improves instruction, staff effectiveness, and school culture
2) Still accounts for the daily realities of a school
3) Prevents my week from getting swallowed by urgent but low-impact tasks
4) Creates intentional space for leadership work, not just operational survival
How to think while building this schedule: Assume my days will be interrupted. Build in buffer time. Protect time for instructional leadership, staff support, and planning. Batch shallow work so it does not leak into everything else. Do not overpack the schedule. If something does not deserve calendar space, do not give it space.
Here is my to-do list (everything currently pulling at my attention):
[Paste full to-do list here: big things, small things, lingering things]
Here is my fixed schedule and required obligations (Monday-Friday):
[List by day if possible. Include things like:
- Arrival and departure times
- Required meetings (standing meetings, IEPs, leadership team, district meetings, etc.)
- Supervision duties (arrival, lunch, dismissal)
- Any non-negotiables that must be honored]
Before you create the schedule, ask me 7 questions you need answered to build the perfect weekly schedule for me. I will answer the questions. After I answer them, make the schedule.”

What this prompt does:
1) Protects time for instruction, staff, and culture
2) Accounts for interruptions
3) Builds buffers so urgent nonsense doesn’t hijack your day
4) Batches low-impact work so it stops leaking everywhere

Use this to stop reacting to your week and start designing it.

To protecting your leadership time,
William Grube
Founder, Gruvy Education

PS - Want to discover more ways that you can use AI in your pre-existing workflow? Check out our AI Workflow Playbook for School Leaders.