There’s a particular kind of dread that comes from opening your inbox on a Monday morning and seeing forty-one unread emails, three of which are clearly going to need real thought, and one of which is a thread that’s been running for four days with everyone copied in and nobody quite agreeing.
This is what AI is actually good for. Not the big, abstract promises — the small, repetitive, slightly draining tasks that eat the first ninety minutes of your day before you’ve done anything that actually matters.
Here’s exactly how Anna uses it.
The long thread nobody’s summarised
Open the thread. Copy the contents — or, if your email tool has Copilot or a similar AI assistant built in, just point it at the thread directly.
The prompt:
“Summarise this email thread. List any decisions that were made, and any actions I need to take, including who owns them and by when.”
What comes back is a clean summary — decisions at the top, actions below, names attached. A four-day thread with eleven replies becomes four sentences you can actually use.
This single prompt is probably worth more time saved per week than anything else in this post. Use it on any thread with more than three or four replies.
The email you’ve been avoiding
Some emails sit in drafts for days. Not because they’re hard to write technically — because they require navigating a slightly uncomfortable situation and getting the tone exactly right feels harder than it should.
The prompt:
“Help me write an email to [name/role] about [topic]. The situation is: [brief context]. I want them to [desired outcome]. The tone should be [direct / diplomatic / warm] — keep it to three short paragraphs.”
The draft that comes back won’t be perfect. It rarely captures exactly what you’d say. But it removes the blank page, which is usually the actual obstacle. Read it, adjust the parts that don’t sound like you, and send something considerably better than what you’d have produced after three days of avoidance.
The reply that needs to sound like you said no, kindly
Declining things — a meeting, a request, an invitation to take on more work — is its own category of difficult email. The instinct is either to over-explain or to be too blunt.
The prompt:
“Help me decline [request] from [name] clearly but kindly, in a way that keeps the relationship intact. I want to leave the door open for [alternative, if relevant].”
This produces something that says no without being cold, and without the three paragraphs of justification most people feel compelled to write when they’re declining something.
The morning triage
Before anything else, some mornings call for a different kind of help — not drafting, but deciding what actually matters in the pile.
The prompt:
“Here are the subject lines and senders from my unread emails: [paste the list]. Which of these need a response today, which can wait until later this week, and which look like they don’t need a response at all?”
This works best when you paste a genuinely messy list — the AI is good at spotting patterns (a vendor follow-up, a calendar invite reply, a genuine client question) faster than you can when you’re scanning with half-focused Monday-morning eyes.
What this actually saves
None of these prompts are clever. They’re not secrets. They’re simply the right question, asked of a tool that’s good at exactly this kind of task — reading, summarising, drafting, triaging.
What they save, over a working week, is not minutes here and there. It’s the particular kind of fatigue that comes from starting every day already behind, before you’ve done a single piece of meaningful work.
That fatigue is optional now. It wasn’t a year ago.
What to try this week
Pick one of these four prompts. Use it on something real in your inbox today — not a test, the actual thing you’ve been putting off or dreading. See what comes back.
If you’re not sure where to start with AI more broadly, How to Start Using AI Without Feeling Overwhelmed is the right place. And if any of the terms in these prompts feel unfamiliar, the AI glossary has plain-English definitions for all of them.