It’s in your inbox right now. Someone asked for something. You know your answer. You’ve known it since Thursday.

But every time you open the reply window, you close it and go do three easier things.

The Challenge: the answer isn’t hard. The writing is.

All month we’ve worked on what to say. The holding line buys you a day. The counteroffer gives them part of the problem. The exit gets you out of a yes you shouldn’t have given.

You probably know which one you need. That was never the bottleneck.

The bottleneck is the blank reply box at 9:40 p.m. Clear but not cold. Firm but not defensive. Short but not rude. So the email sits. And every day it sits, the answer gets harder to give.

The Solution:you decide, AI drafts

Split the job in two. The decision is yours. Nobody else knows your calendar, your relationships, or what you can actually carry.

The wording is grunt work. Hand it off.

Paste the ask into AI, tell it which answer you’re giving, and get a draft. Then edit it the way you’d edit a resident’s note. Fix what’s wrong, cut what’s extra, send it.

One rule before you paste anything. Strip names and anything that touches a patient. Write “my chair” and “the committee.” The AI doesn’t need to know who. It needs to know what.

The Prompt: paste into your fave AI

I’m a physician. Below is a request I received by email, with names and identifying details removed.

[paste the request]

My decision: [hold / counteroffer / exit].​
​Context: [what I can and can’t do, my real constraints, any end date or handoff I’m offering].

Before you write anything, tell me if my decision looks wrong based on what I’ve told you.

Then write my reply. Under 120 words. Give the answer in the first two sentences. Thank them once at most. Apologize once at most. If it’s a counteroffer, name exactly what I’ll do and when it ends. If it’s an exit, include an end date and a handoff. Sound like a colleague, not a policy memo.

Then give me a warmer version and a more direct version. Tell me which one you’d send and why.

The Number: 61 to 47

When Stanford gave clinicians AI-drafted replies to patient portal messages, their task load scores dropped from about 61 to about 47. Work exhaustion scores fell too.

Here’s what didn’t make the headline. Reply time, write time, and read time didn’t change. A UC San Diego study found the same pattern: no faster replies, and slightly longer read times.

So the drafts didn’t save minutes. They removed weight.

A caveat. Those were patient messages inside an EHR tool built for that job, not committee emails in a chatbot. But the problem is the same blank page. Your avoided email isn’t four minutes of typing. It’s the dread in front of the typing.

The Move

Find the oldest email you’ve been avoiding. You know the one.

Run it through the prompt. Edit for five minutes. Send it before you close the laptop today.

Next Sunday

That closes October. Four weeks on what to say when the ask lands on you.

November is about the work that follows you home. The charting you finish after dinner. The inbox you clear in bed. The forms that wait for Saturday.

Before AI can give any of that time back, you need to know where it actually goes. Next week: a one-week audit of your evenings, and the prompt that turns it into a plan.

Dr. Heath

P.S. Reply and tell me what that email was. Sent or still sitting. I read every reply.

I work with physicians on burnout, leadership, and figuring out what comes next. If this newsletter keeps describing your week back to you, that is usually a sign it is worth a conversation. Book a free Clarity Session.​

The Weekly Reset is a free newsletter on AI and productivity for busy physicians. Brought to you by Physician Coaching Solutions.

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