The Waterline Prompt
Outlook / Microsoft 365
In your own approved work account, use this version if your AI can access your Outlook calendar and sent mail.
Read the prompt
Use my last 8 weeks of Outlook calendar events and sent emails that you are authorised and able to access. First tell me which sources are available. If you cannot access either source, stop and tell me what I need to supply; do not pretend you have read it. You are helping me map where my working hours actually go. This is for a company exercise about which work should stay human. Sort my time into five layers: 1. Strategy — deciding what the company should do and why. Direction, priorities, calls only I can make. 2. Coordination — aligning people: status meetings, chasing, forwarding, translating one team's work for another. 3. Manual operations — producing the work: drafting, building, calculating, checking, formatting. 4. Organisational friction — work that exists only because something upstream is broken: rework, duplicate entry, reconciling versions, meetings to fix earlier meetings. 5. AI-assisted / automated — already handled by a tool, little human touch. For each layer give me estimated hours per week, percentage of tracked time, and 2–3 concrete examples from my actual data. Keep examples anonymous and describe only the category of work. Then answer: which of my hours below Strategy need my specific judgment and experience, and which could be done by someone — or something — else with a good brief? Output a short table I can paste into a document. Do not include anyone's name, message text or private content — categories and numbers only. Do not invent missing data or treat email timestamps as time spent. Avoid counting a meeting and an email about that meeting twice. State what period and data you could actually inspect. Separate measured calendar time from estimates, show uncertainty, and say which work is missing. The five percentages should total 100% of tracked time, not claim to cover my whole working week.