I finally dropped my 12 item prompt checklist and my drafts got better

For about a year I kept a little note on my phone with 12 things every prompt had to have. A named character, a time limit, a twist, a banned word list, all of it. I would sit at my kitchen table in Fort Wayne and run each idea through the list before I let myself write a word. Last month I read back 30 of those drafts and most of them felt the same. Same shape, same careful little setup. So I tore the list down to 3 things and let the rest go. The prompts I wrote after that were messier but way more fun to actually draft from. I am not saying lists are bad. Mine just turned into a cage. What does your prompt routine look like, do you keep any rules at all or do you just write whatever pops in?