Claude Prompts for Decision Making in Personal Productivity

Run a structured pre-mortem on a plan you are about to commit to. Surface failure modes, weight likelihood and impact, then propose specific mitigations.

Explore a decision by branching into multiple reasoning paths, scoring each branch on the same criteria, then committing to the strongest one with explicit trade-offs.

Take a yes/no decision and expand it into 4-6 real options with tradeoffs — because most binary decisions are false binaries.

Strip a problem down to its load-bearing assumptions, then rebuild from atoms. Forces Claude to separate what is true from what is convention.

Invert the goal. Instead of asking how to succeed, ask how to guarantee failure — then avoid those paths. Forces Claude to map the failure surface, not just the success path.

Decompose a problem into Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive buckets so analysis cannot double-count or quietly skip a branch.

Imagine the decision failed catastrophically 12 months from now and work backward to identify the failure modes you can prevent today.

Determine whether a decision is reversible (Type 2 — make it fast) or irreversible (Type 1 — slow down) so you spend the right amount of deliberation.

Map the chain of consequences from a proposed action — not just what happens, but what happens because of what happens. Surface incentive shifts, downstream behaviors, and second-order risks.

Get advice on a tough decision from a simulated 'personal board' — distinct advisors who'd give you genuinely different perspectives, not consensus.