Treat it like a pipeline, not a lottery
Most job-search advice boils down to “apply more.” For neurodivergent brains especially, that's a recipe for burnout: every application costs executive function, and spending it on roles you'd never take — or that would never take you — is how a search stalls out by week three.
So I run my search like a pipeline with four stages: intake, filter, apply, rest. Each stage gets its own day and its own rules, and no stage is allowed to leak into the others. Monday me collects leads. Tuesday me judges them. Midweek me applies to the survivors. Friday me closes the laptop.
The rest stage is not a reward. It's load-bearing.
Intake: collect leads without doomscrolling
The intake rule is that browsing and deciding never happen at the same time. While I'm collecting, everything vaguely plausible goes into the pile — no evaluating, no agonizing, and definitely no reading Glassdoor reviews at midnight.
Leads come from three places:
- Saved boolean searches (below), run once or twice a week — not daily.
- Email alerts, forwarded into one folder that I process in a single sitting.
- Actual humans. A warm referral skips the line and beats everything else in this note.
Boolean searches that actually work
Job boards reward whoever writes the better query. A few operators do most of the work: quotes pin an exact phrase, OR (capitalized) broadens, the minus sign excludes, and site: searches inside one specific job board. Some of my workhorses:
"product designer" (lead OR staff OR principal) -senior site:boards.greenhouse.io site:jobs.lever.co "design systems" remote intitle:"product designer" remote -crypto -contract
The site: queries search the big applicant-tracking systems directly, which surfaces roles days before they reach the aggregators. Swap the quoted titles for yours, and save every search you'd run twice somewhere permanent, so future-you never rebuilds them from scratch.
The ethical and practical filter
Before I evaluate a single posting, I write down my no-go categories — the industries and employers I won't work for regardless of the compensation. Deciding this in advance matters, because a shiny offer is exactly the wrong moment to discover your principles are negotiable.
My list includes categories like crypto and defense contractors; yours will be different, and that's the point. Next to the ethical lines go the practical ones: a compensation floor, location and remote requirements, and the team shapes you already know you wilt in.
Every lead gets a verdict against that written list — strong yes, yes, maybe, no, strong no — with the reason recorded. A maybe gets one week to resolve or it becomes a no. The written reason is the magic: it stops you from relitigating the same posting four times.
The Claude + Notion workflow
The pipeline lives in a Notion database: one row per lead, with source, status, verdict, and dates. Claude does the reading-heavy middle. I paste in a job description, it checks the role against my written criteria, and it drafts the verdict-with-reasons for me to confirm or overrule.
The division of labor is deliberate. Claude is tireless about reading the two-thousandth job description; I stay the only one with opinions. Nothing gets a final verdict — and nothing gets sent to anyone — without my eyes on it.
If you want the exact database properties and prompts, email me. That's its own note, and if enough people ask, I'll write it.
How this became Good Prospect
Eventually I did what designers do to any process they've run more than twice: I turned it into a product. Good Prospect is this whole system as an app — paste in your leads, run them through your own ethical and practical filter, and get bucketed verdicts with the reasons attached. It's live, and your filter stays yours.
The cadence that doesn't burn you out
A job search is a marathon that keeps insisting it's a sprint. The system above exists so that no single day requires you to be brave, organized, and resilient all at once — each day borrows only one of those.
And here's the reframe that keeps me sane: a no is the pipeline working. Every verdict, including the rejections, narrows the funnel toward the role you'd actually take. You only need one yes, and you can't run out of nos before you get there.