You know that feeling — you need to send an email to your doctor’s office, a contractor, or someone you’ve never met before, and you spend 20 minutes just figuring out how to start it.

AI completely solves that.

Here’s the prompt I use:

“Write a professional but friendly email to [person or role — e.g. my landlord, the school principal, my doctor’s office]. The purpose of the email is to [what you want to accomplish]. Keep it brief, polite, and end with a clear next step.”

Paste that into ChatGPT, fill in the two blanks, and hit send. In about 10 seconds you’ll have a draft that sounds polished, hits your main point, and doesn’t ramble.

You can tweak it as much as you want — but most of the time, the first draft is almost exactly right.

Try it the next time you’re avoiding an email you know you need to send. You’ll wonder how you ever wrote them without it.

— Brian