How I Stopped Procrastinating on Proposals by Redesigning Work from First Principles

I kept walking past the same task on my to-do list. "Write proposal for X." Days would pass. Sometimes a fortnight. The strange bit was that I had loved the conversation that triggered it. We had been sparking. I had walked away with a head full of what we could build together.

Somewhere between that conversation and my laptop, the energy fell off a cliff.

I have a practice of questioning what is actually happening in my world of work. So I sat with this one. Why was I procrastinating on something I was excited about?

What emerged was this: writing a proposal is work that consumes my energy. Interfacing with my computer to produce a polished document is one of the kinds of work I find most challenging. The thing on my to-do list and the thing I actually wanted to do had nothing in common.

So I asked the next question. What wouldn't consume your energy?

What the Imaginarium actually is

The answer was almost embarrassingly obvious. I was already doing it naturally - imagining what the world looked like once this had happened, the journey there, the value it would create. The bit that drained me was the translation: sitting at a screen, formatting, second-guessing the language.

So I separated the two.

The new practice is this. I walk in the forest. I hug a few trees, because that is what I like to do. And I leave myself a voice note. Not a structured one. Just rich, descriptive context about everything in my head about this collaboration. What we are building. Who for. What the journey looks like. Who is on the team. What it feels like at month three when it is hard, and at month nine when something clicks.

That voice note then goes into what I call the Imaginarium - a set of Claude skills and folders that take the voice note and produce the output document. My work is entirely removed from having to interface with my computer. I just speak what I think, and the system does the thing I find draining.

But the bigger shift was not the automation. It was the reframe.

From proposal to invitation

A proposal feeds into insecurities about value. You are asking someone to pay you, listing your credentials, predicting what they want to read. The whole genre is built around a posture I find uncomfortable.

An invitation to partnership is different. I am not pitching. I am sharing what I have already imagined and asking if they want to build it with me. That redefines the work. It becomes work that energises me, because it is an honest expression of what we could do together.

The folder structure - what is actually in there

When I show people the Imaginarium, they always want to know what is under the hood. It is not complicated. There are six folders that map to the thinking I am already doing naturally:

1. Who is Hugo - The context documents about me. My values, my experience, what I bring, what I do not bring. This means the AI is not making up what I offer.
2. Who is the collaborator - Everything I know about the person or organisation I am creating an invitation for. Their context, their challenges, what they are trying to achieve. I pull this from my Relay CRM, from discovery calls, from their website.
3. What does an invitation to collaborate look like - The structure and tone. This is not a template. It is the pattern of how I think about partnerships. What belongs in there, what does not, what makes it feel like me.
4. How do we estimate value - The models and frameworks I use to articulate what this collaboration might create. Not invented numbers. The logic of value.
5. How do we build a detailed plan - Journey mapping, team structure, what happens in each phase, what the obstacles look like, what stories we need to tell to different people.
6. How do we articulate a vision - The bit that connects the work to the bigger picture. What does the world look like when this has landed?

That is it. Six folders. Each one contains the thinking I would be doing anyway. The AI just takes my voice note and assembles it using that structure.

The dream ladder - starting from the top down

When I am imagining the journey, I use a structure my friend John Mulholland showed me, drawn from his Cat 1 work. I have adapted it into what I call the dream ladder.

Most planning starts at the bottom. Tasks first, then maybe goals, occasionally a mission, rarely a vision, almost never a dream. We have been trained to compress upwards. The dream ladder makes you expand downwards instead.

You start with the dream. Not the goal, not the outcome - the dream. What does the world look like when this has fully landed?

Then the point of vision, where the dream comes to life as something you can describe.

From the vision, the mission.

From the mission, the goals.

From the goals, the tasks.

I love it because it forces you to start at the top. When I am voice-noting, I am building the project from the dream downwards. Team size and structure. The obstacles we will face. The stories we will need to tell to different people. How people are going to feel over the journey. What data we will need to collect.

I am going into real details in that imagination, which translates into a journey that is really strong.

The newest bit - letting them tweak my imagination

The newest piece is the one I am most excited about. The Imaginarium does not just describe value. It creates an interactive model of that value, which the person I am inviting to collaborate can tweak, disagree with, and rerun with their own assumptions.

The AI is producing interactive assets that let someone else see into my imagination - and then change it. The starting point is collaboration, not approval. They are not reading my proposal and saying yes or no. They are stepping into my dream and helping shape it before we have begun.

For something like the Harpenden AI vision website, the Imaginarium runs the same process but knows the output is an interactive site selling a deeper vision. Whatever is in my imagination, the Imaginarium can give it shape.

WishCraft is the work we forgot we could do

I have started framing this as the artscience of wishcraft - a new discipline I think is emerging.

Wishcraft is a blend of design, product, innovation, systems thinking, peak performance, technology, data and AI. It is the artscience of manifesting your dreams using AI.

AI can do a lot of the jobs we have been doing. That part is obvious now. What is less obvious is that this frees us up to do the jobs we have not been doing, which can create much more value.

Our entrepreneurs and leaders have been captured inside computers and told to minimise their dreams. We invented the term Minimum Viable Product, popularised by Eric Ries's 2011 book The Lean Startup, and we made minimisation sound like a virtue.

In a scarcity-based economy that made sense. You could not afford to dream big because you could not afford to build big. We are not in that economy any more. The bottleneck has shifted. It is no longer execution capacity. It is the size of the dream we are able to articulate.

We need the maximum ambitious dream first, and work down to the minimum meaningful jump on the way there. Often this is the minimum viable product. The dream is the input. The MVP is the milestone. We had it backwards.

What I would invite you to try

AI is a forcing function for redesigning how we work from the ground up. The Imaginarium is what happened when I stopped trying to make AI fit into my existing workflow and instead asked what work would look like if I designed it from scratch around what energises me.

Notice the things on your to-do list that you keep walking past. Sit with why. The answer is almost never laziness. It is usually that the work, as currently defined, consumes energy in a direction you do not want to go.

Then ask the second question. What version of this work would actually energise you? Not the most efficient or professional version - the one that would make you want to do it.

The gap between those answers is where wishcraft lives.

Start with the dream ladder. What is the dream? Not the outcome you are willing to settle for - the actual dream. Then work down from there. Point of vision. Mission. Goals. Tasks.

Build your own folder structure. What are the six things you are already thinking about naturally when you are doing your best work? That is your structure. You do not need mine.

And then separate the imagining bit from the typing bit. Let AI do the typing bit. You do the imagining bit.

That, I think, is a really interesting place to spend more of your time.