It’s 10:15 p.m. You’re in bed. You tell yourself you’ll knock out three messages so tomorrow starts lighter.

Twenty-five minutes later you’ve answered nine. Four of them said almost the same thing.

If you kept last week’s log, the inbox probably showed up more often than you expected. Not in big blocks. In small ones. Five minutes here, ten there, scattered across every night.

The Challenge: it never feels big enough to fix

Charting feels like work. You sit down for it. The inbox doesn’t feel that way. It’s a refill. A lab question. “Is this rash normal?” Each one takes two minutes.

So you never plan for it. You fill gaps with it. And since there are no gaps at work, the gaps are at home.

Here’s the other part. Most messages aren’t new problems. They’re the same ten questions in different words. Every night you write answers from scratch that you’ve already written a hundred times.

The Solution: write the reply once

AI can help with the inbox in two ways. Only one is safe to do from your couch.

The first is drafting replies to actual patient messages. If your health system has turned on AI drafts inside the EHR, use them. Edit them like a resident’s note. But don’t paste patient messages into a personal chatbot. Not with names stripped. Not “just this once.”

The second needs no patient data at all. Use AI to build a short library of reply templates for the messages you get most. Then save them as smart phrases or quick text in your EHR.

The decision stays yours. The blank box doesn’t.

While you’re at it, ask a harder question.

Which of these messages should reach you at all? Some belong with your nurse or MA under a standing protocol. AI can help you draft that protocol too.

The Prompt: paste into your fave AI

I’m a [specialty] physician. Below are the message types I answer most often in my patient inbox, described in general terms, with roughly how many I get each week. No patient information is included.

[list 5 to 8 types, e.g., “refill request for a stable chronic medication, about 15 a week”]

For each type:​
​1. Write a reply template under 80 words in plain language a patient can read easily. Use [brackets] for anything I need to fill in.​
​2. Add one optional line for when the patient needs to be seen instead.​
​3. Tell me whether a nurse or MA could handle this type under a standing protocol, and what that protocol would need to say. If the answer is no, say so.

Then tell me which two templates will save me the most time, based on the volumes I gave you.

The Number:2.32 minutes

During the pandemic, patient messages climbed to 157% of their prepandemic average. Each additional patient message was tied to about 2.32 more minutes in the EHR per day. Later data showed volumes stayed well above where they were before.

Two minutes sounds like nothing. That’s the trap. Ten extra messages a day is 23 minutes. Every day. That time has to come from somewhere. For a lot of us, it comes from the evening.

The Move

Scroll back through the last 20 messages you answered. Don’t copy them. Tally them by type on a sticky note.

Take your top five into the prompt. Read every template like you’re signing it, because you are. Save the best two as smart phrases before Monday clinic.

When the inbox isn’t the problem

Sometimes the inbox is the problem. Templates fix that.

Sometimes it’s a symptom. The messages pile up because the job has grown past what one person can carry. And somewhere along the way, you stopped asking whether you still want to carry it.

If that sounds closer to the truth, that’s the work I do with physicians. Reply and tell me what’s going on. Or book a free Clarity Session.

Next Sunday

The inbox is the small stuff. Next week is the big one: the notes you finish after dinner. What AI scribes actually do, what they get wrong, and how to decide if one is worth it for you.

Dr. Heath

P.S. Last week I asked for your guess. Now I want the real number. How many minutes a night did your log show, and which bucket won? 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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