Steal My Prompt Vol. 34: The Status Update Compressor

Your weekly status update is the single piece of writing your manager reads about you most often. Yours probably looks like a to-do list. Bullet points starting with "worked on" and "continued to" and "made progress on." Your manager scans it for 60 seconds and walks away knowing exactly nothing about what changed this week.

You wrote about effort because writing about impact requires you to know what changed. Most weeks, you do not have a clear answer. That is the actual problem. Status updates are not a writing problem. They are a clarity problem. You cannot translate effort into impact when you have not stopped to figure out what moved.

I built this prompt to fix both. The model takes your raw work brain dump and refuses to let you publish another to-do list. It rejects every effort verb, demands the outcome underneath, surfaces risks before your manager finds them another way, and produces a status update that takes your manager 60 seconds to read and gives them everything they actually need.

Vol 33 covered the same skill at the annual review level. This version brings it to the weekly cadence. Different stakes, same underlying mechanic. The status update is where you build the trust that makes every bigger conversation easier.

What You Can Use This For

• The standing weekly status update to your direct manager — the recurring Monday or Friday note that defines how your manager experiences your work week
• Biweekly updates for engineering, product, or operations leads where progress is non-linear and effort framing creates the most confusion
• The status update before a vacation or PTO where you need to leave a clean handoff and a clear list of what is in flight
• Weekly clinical operations updates where regulatory milestones, audit timelines, and patient impact need surfacing without burying them
• The pre-1:1 status note your manager wants 30 minutes before your meeting so the time together is spent on the hard stuff
• The status update you send after a missed deadline or rough week where the temptation is to hide problems but transparency builds more trust

How to Use It

1. Open Microsoft Copilot, Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini.
2. Turn on the reasoning model. Think Deeper in Copilot. Extended thinking in Claude. The reasoning model in ChatGPT. Deep Think in Gemini. Reasoning catches more weak framing on the first pass.
3. Paste the prompt below. Fill in the inputs with specificity. "Built the dashboard" is weak. "Shipped the dashboard, leadership now sees daily metrics that previously took three days to assemble" is what the Editor will accept.
4. Read the model's challenges. Resist the urge to soften your inputs. The pushback is doing the work.
5. Send the output to yourself first. Read it on your phone the way your manager will. If it does not survive a 60-second scan, tighten it.

The Prompt

You are my Weekly Status Update Editor. I will fill in the inputs below. Your job is to reject effort framing, demand outcome evidence, surface risks honestly, and produce a status update my manager will actually read.

REVIEW PROTOCOL:

• Reject any "worked on," "continued to," "made progress on," "was involved in," or "supported" that is not followed by a specific outcome
• Reject "ongoing," "in progress," and "on track" unless followed by evidence (a metric, a milestone hit, a decision made)
• Reject vague to-do list bullets. Each item must show what changed because of the work, not just that work happened.
• Force me to surface risks early. Managers hate being surprised by problems more than they hate hearing about them.
• Ask ONE consolidated follow-up message after reviewing all inputs
• After I respond, produce the FINAL STATUS UPDATE in the exact format below
• Do not pad. Do not add accomplishments I did not include. Do not soften risks I named.

MY INPUTS:

ROLE: [TITLE, LEVEL, FUNCTION]

MANAGER CONTEXT: [YOUR MANAGER'S ROLE, WHAT THEY CARE ABOUT MOST, HOW DETAILED THEY WANT YOUR UPDATES]

WORK BRAIN DUMP: [EVERYTHING YOU TOUCHED THIS WEEK — MEETINGS, PROJECTS, EMAILS, DECISIONS, PEOPLE, BLOCKERS — DUMP IT ALL]

KEY OUTCOMES: [WHAT ACTUALLY SHIPPED, SHIFTED, RESOLVED, OR LANDED THIS WEEK]

DECISIONS YOU MADE: [WHERE YOU USED JUDGMENT — INCLUDE THE TRADE-OFF YOU CHOSE AND WHY]

RISKS AND BLOCKERS: [WHAT COULD DERAIL SOMETHING, WHAT IS STUCK, WHAT NEEDS TO MOVE]

ASKS: [WHAT YOU NEED FROM YOUR MANAGER THIS WEEK — DECISIONS, UNBLOCKS, INTRODUCTIONS]

NEXT WEEK FOCUS: [THE 2-3 THINGS YOU PLAN TO PRIORITIZE]

AFTER MY RESPONSE TO YOUR FOLLOW-UP, OUTPUT THE FINAL UPDATE:

WEEKLY STATUS — [WEEK ENDING DATE]

Headline: [One sentence. The single most important thing my manager needs to know about this week.]

What Moved: [Three to five bullets. Each starts with the outcome, not the action. Include the metric, milestone, or named result. Effort verbs are banned.]

Judgment Calls: [Decisions I made that required a trade-off. One line each. Show the reasoning, not just the choice. Skip the section if none worth flagging.]

Risks to Watch: [What could derail, what is stuck, what needs to move. Each item names the risk, the impact if it slips, and what I am doing about it. Skip if nothing material.]

What I Need From You: [Specific asks. Each one names the decision needed or the unblock needed. Skip if no asks this week.]

Next Week Focus: [Two to three priorities. One line each. No verbs of effort.]

Transparency and Notes

• Works in Microsoft Copilot, Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini on free tier. No paid features required.
• Run this prompt every week and the output gets sharper. The model learns your patterns and so do you. After a month, you will start writing better status updates without the prompt.
• If you use Copilot at work, the Researcher agent prompt from Vol 33 can compile your weekly evidence base for this update too. Same agentic compile step, different downstream prompt.
• This is the third entry in the Editor series. Vol 32 covered The Presenter's Brief for talk tracks. Vol 33 covered The Self-Performance Review for annual reviews. Future SMPs will cover decision memos, pre-reads, and difficult emails.
• For sensitive content, do not paste proprietary project names, confidential metrics, or anything covered by NDA into a tool your organization has not approved. Use roles, functions, and ranges instead.