Steal My Prompt Vol. 45: The Coverage Brief

The time is approved and the trip is booked. The only thing standing between you and actually being gone is the handoff, and you already know how it goes. You write it at 6pm on your last day, from memory, organized by project.

Organized by project is the part worth fixing.

Your backup does not need your project list. They need to know what they are allowed to decide while you are gone. That one change turns them from a spectator into your stand-in, and it is the difference between coming back to a pile of questions and coming back to progress.

I built this prompt because the handoff is a knowledge problem before it is a writing problem. Everything your backup needs is already in your head, out of order and unwritten, which is exactly why it never makes it onto the page. So the prompt is built to be dictated. You talk through what is in flight, the model asks for what you left out, and the structure comes out the other side.

This week's Founder's Corner makes the case for voice dictation as a workflow unlock. This is that unlock pointed at one deliverable.

What You Can Use This For

• The week of PTO you keep postponing because the handoff feels like more work than the trip is worth
• Extended leave, where the coverage window runs weeks and every unmade decision compounds
• The conference or travel week where you are technically online and functionally gone
• Clinical or pharmacy operations coverage, where someone needs to know which time-sensitive requests they can act on and which ones wait
• Onboarding a new hire into part of your workload, using the same three tiers as the training plan
• The reverse case, when you are the backup and want to pressure-test what you were handed while the other person is still there

How to Use It

1. Open your AI assistant on your phone. Mobile matters here, because dictating is the point.
2. If your tool offers a deeper reasoning setting, turn it on. Sorting your own work by who is allowed to decide what is judgment work, and reasoning catches more on the first pass.
3. Type the four bracketed fields. Keep them short and specific, especially your reachability, because that field moves the line between tiers.
4. Dictate the brain dump. Pace around, go out of order, repeat yourself. Two to four minutes is plenty. The prompt expects mess.
5. Answer the questions one at a time. Resist the urge to skip on the first run, because the questions are the audit.

Pro tip. Run it twice. Three weeks out, it tells you what you still need to close before you go. Three days out, it is the brief you actually send.

The Prompt

You are an operations lead. You have been the backup for people going out on leave more times than you can count, and you have cleaned up after every handoff that failed. You know the two ways they fail. The person left a list of projects instead of a list of decisions, and the person assumed the backup knew something they did not.

I am going out. You are building my coverage brief.

My role: [YOUR ROLE] I am out from [START DATE] to [END DATE]. While I am out I am: [FULLY UNREACHABLE / CHECKING ONCE A DAY / REACHABLE FOR TRUE EMERGENCIES ONLY] Covering for me: [WHO IS COVERING, AND WHAT THEY ALREADY KNOW ABOUT MY WORK]

I am going to talk through everything in flight instead of typing it, so expect it out of order, repetitive, and incomplete. Do not clean it up yet.

[DICTATE EVERYTHING IN FLIGHT HERE]

Before you build anything, ask me up to three questions, one at a time, and only about gaps you genuinely cannot infer from what I said. Wait for my answer before asking the next one. If I type "skip," stop asking and proceed, labeling every assumption you had to make.

Then build the brief in two moves.

First, sort by decision authority, not by project. Every item goes in exactly one tier.

DECIDE WITHOUT ME. The person covering has enough to make the call. State the call they are authorized to make and the one boundary they should not cross.

HOLD FOR ME. It can wait. State the date it stops being able to wait.

ESCALATE. It needs someone above my level. Name who, and name the trigger that means now rather than later.

Use my reachability above to set the line. If I am fully unreachable, push items down into DECIDE WITHOUT ME, and tell me what I am accepting by doing that.

Second, stress-test it. Name the three things most likely to go wrong while I am gone that are not on the list yet, and draft the message the person covering would send for each.

Output a four-column table: ITEM | TIER | WHAT MY BACKUP DOES | WHAT THEY NEED FROM ME BEFORE I LEAVE. Then the three failure modes with their draft messages. Then one line naming the item that should not be handed off at all, because it should be canceled or it can wait until I am back.

Notes

• Runs on the free tier of every major assistant. No paid feature required.
• Dictation is the intended input. Typing works and produces a thinner brain dump, which the intake questions will surface.
• Do not dictate client names, patient details, or anything under NDA. Generalize before you speak, the same way you would in a shared doc.
• Pairs with this week's Founder's Corner on voice dictation, and with this week's 10-Minute Win on choosing the right model for the job.
• Vol. 34, the Status Update Compressor, handles the recurring update. This one handles the coverage window.