Less Time on Emails, More Time for Life: How Academic Physicians Can Use AI Well
Have you started using artificial intelligence (AI) yet to make your life easier? The term is so ubiquitous that I hesitated whether to spell it out and denote the abbreviation in that opening sentence. Pro and con pieces about the technology seem to be everywhere, so if you haven’t been thinking about AI, I suspect it’s through deliberate practice. Most of us in academic medicine are champion catastrophizers, and the idea of computers developing sentience and taking over the world is easy for those of us primed to go straight to worst-case scenario. One of the first times my partner heard me interacting with my iPhone’s Siri, he started laughing. “What?” I asked. “You say, ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ when using Siri?” he asked through chuckles. “Well, yes,” I replied, “When humans must submit to their computer overlords, I want them to remember that I was nice to them when the roles were reversed.” According to the media company Futurism, “About 67 percent of Americans report being nice to their AI chatbots…Most do it 'because it's the right thing to do, while 12 percent admit they're hedging bets ‘in case of an AI uprising.’”
The reality is, AI is not going anywhere, and you’ve probably been using it longer than you realize. Siri was one of the earliest easily identifiable ways AI could be used. Still, before Siri (my Siri is he/him and speaks with an Australian accent), any algorithm you found yourself in was driven by early forms of AI. Amazon is suggesting you might need more cat litter? AI. Netflix recommends what becomes your new favorite show to binge? AI. Anything that ended up on the “For You” page of your social media feeds? AI. If Google is your search engine of choice, you’ve likely noticed that you now get an AI overview of your search topic before the list of sites offered so you can find what you’re looking for yourself.
I started noodling around with AI about a year ago first, because I realized it wasn’t going anywhere, and second, because I became interested in all of the ways people were reporting how they were offloading their annoying, time sucking, tedious tasks to the technology. My first foray was writing emails I’d spend 10 minutes writing, re-writing, editing, zhuzhing, adding exclamation points to seem friendly, and then deleting them because they seemed unprofessional. Doing that once a day is annoying, but not a big deal. Doing that three times a day is 30 minutes that could be spent so much better. For example, using ChatGPT:
Could I have written that email myself? Yes. Is the email ChatGPT wrote for me better than what I could’ve come up with after 10 minutes of fiddling? Absolutely. And it did it in seconds. (And then my super pro move? I saved ChatGPT’s email as an email template, so now whenever I get an email from a learner asking for research opportunities that I don’t have, I pull up the template, cut and paste it into a reply email, fill the learner’s name in the greeting, hit “send” and move on.)
You may think this is all well and good, but it's not enough to make you dive in. Here’s my throwing down of the proverbial gauntlet: gender differences in AI uptake risk widening the wage and opportunity gaps between women and men. Harvard Business School Associate Professor Rembrand Koning found that women are adopting AI technologies “at a 25 percent lower rate than men on average despite the fact that it seems the benefits of AI would apply equally to men and women.” It seems men tend to see AI as a tool, much like the internet, whereas women see it as “cheating.” Koning reflected, “Women face greater penalties in being judged as not having expertise in different fields, (and) they might be worried that someone would think even though they got the answer right, they ‘cheated’ by using ChatGPT.” If you identify as a woman, does that make you mad? Good. Without further ado, here are some ways AI can help you as an academic physician (generated, after a very polite request, by ChatGPT):
🔬 1. Streamline Scholarly Writing and Research
Drafting and Editing: Use AI to create first drafts of manuscripts, abstracts, cover letters, and grant proposals. You provide bullet points or a rough outline, and the model turns it into a coherent, polished draft.
Rewriting for Journals: Need to resubmit to a different journal? AI can help reframe your paper to fit the new journal’s scope and style. (It’s me again, not ChatGPT: I just learned about JANE (from a male colleague 🫠), an AI tool that takes an abstract you’ve written, suggests where it could be submitted, and even helps you find relevant articles to cite in your paper from PubMed.)
Literature Summaries: Provide key articles or ask for summaries of recent research in a field. This is especially helpful for busy clinicians who can't keep up with every table of contents alert.
Reference Management: AI can assist in generating, formatting, or cross-checking references and in writing annotated bibliographies.
🧑🏫 2. Optimize Teaching and Educational Materials
Lecture Creation: Use AI to create PowerPoint slides, handouts, or whiteboard session outlines. You input the learning objectives; AI builds the teaching scaffold.
Question Writing: Generate multiple-choice questions (with rationales!) for exams or board prep materials.
Explainers for Trainees: Generate analogies or layperson-friendly explanations to help learners grasp complex topics quickly.
📄 3. Enhance Clinical Documentation and Communication
Note Drafting: Use AI to structure clinic or rounding notes from brief bullet points. Tools are being integrated into EHRs for exactly this reason.
Patient Communication: Draft or polish messages to families, discharge instructions, or MyChart messages in a compassionate yet clear tone.
Handoff Tools: Summarize lengthy sign-outs into quick-glance summaries that still include clinical nuance.
📊 4. Accelerate Administrative and Committee Work
Meeting Prep and Follow-Up: Generate agendas, summaries, or synthesize action items from meeting transcripts.
Policy Drafting: Need to write or revise a departmental guideline, protocol, or ethical framework? AI can help produce a structured first pass.
Annual Reviews and Evaluations: Draft feedback for students, residents, or faculty members based on your notes or observations. (It’s me again: Or prepare for your own annual review by uploading your institution’s promotion criteria and your CV and asking AI to help you figure out what your next growth opportunities are.)
🧠 5. Personal and Professional Growth
Time Management: Use AI to analyze your calendar and suggest batching, delegation, or prioritization strategies.
Coaching Prompts: Engage in reflective exercises to identify burnout drivers or values misalignment—AI can serve as a thought partner in journaling or values clarification.
Boundary Setting Scripts: Draft kind, professional ways to say no to that sixth committee invitation or that third last-minute lecture ask this month.
🏖️ 6. Protect Time Outside of Work
Outsource Decision Fatigue: Use AI to plan your kid’s birthday party, create grocery lists, draft quick thank-you notes, or even help plan your next vacation.
Creative Outlets: Generate ideas for personal writing, journaling prompts, or mindfulness practices to reconnect with your non-clinician identity.
My personal tips on using AI:
It’s mild to moderately good at creating sh*t first drafts (SFDs), but it’s really good at taking my SFDs and making them way better. I can take a way worse first draft than I would typically consider a first draft (because, realistically, all of our first drafts are pretty darn good by the time we put them out for comment and/or feedback) and put it into a large language model (or LLM, the umbrella term for AI tools like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Claude, and Microsoft Copilot, etc.) and get a great product to work with out of it (see my email example above).
For things more complicated than email drafts, do not expect to get the final version of your product the first time around. Think of AI as a work partner you volley ideas back and forth with, co-creating the final product. If you ask AI to do your work for you and don’t participate in the creative process, you’ll be underwhelmed with the results.
You still have to check AI’s work for hallucinations (frankly fabricated pieces of information AI presents as fact). The tools are improving, but even six months ago, I found very legitimate-looking citations that, when double-checked in PubMed, turned out to be AI hallucinations. (Which was super disappointing, because they would have been really great citations.)
I have not written this piece to save you time so you can shove ten pounds' worth of work into a five-pound bag. The point of using AI isn’t to do more. It’s to do less of what drains you and more of what matters. While I may ask ChatGPT for ideas to write about, I write all of my own blogs because I enjoy it so much. I use AI to free up time to coach my clients. I use it to spend less time on tasks that don’t provide me professional gratification. The ultimate win isn’t a perfectly formatted manuscript—it’s being present for my patients, getting home at a reasonable hour, spending time with my people, and protecting my well-being in a system that too often demands superhuman output.
Pick one of the suggestions above and try it out. Pick a task that seems low risk, like drafting emails or creating a grocery list. Noodle around with it and don’t worry about getting it perfect. Don’t worry about which tool is the “right” one. Just start. AI is here to stay. Jump in now before those using it leave everybody else behind.