The Problem

It’s Monday morning. You have 30+ unread emails in a thread about clinic schedules, staffing conflicts, and policy updates. You need to walk into your 7:30 AM leadership meeting prepared—but you spend 20 minutes scrolling that same thread three times trying to figure out what actually got decided.

This is the quiet killer of physician leader productivity. Email overload masquerading as communication.

The Solution

I use Copilot in Outlook to turn messy email chains into one clean list of decisions, actions, and open issues in under a minute.

Here’s the prompt:

How to Use It

1. Open Outlook (Windows, Mac, web, or mobile).
2. Navigate to the email thread you want to summarize.
3. Click the Copilot icon on the right side of the reading pane (looks like a sparkle).
4. Paste the prompt above into the chat box.
5. Hit Enter.
6. Read the brief in 60 seconds.

What you get back: A structured summary with decisions (who decided what), action items (specific tasks with owners and due dates), and open questions (issues that need your input at the meeting).

The Payoff

15–20 minutes of reading time reclaimed before every leadership meeting. Time you can use to prepare your talking points, support your team, or actually think.

Try This Week

Before your next standing leadership or service line meeting, pick one long operational email thread (about staffing, access, or policy changes). Use Copilot’s Summarize feature with the prompt above. Walk in with a one-page brief instead of a mess.

Then—and this is important—tell a colleague about it. Because if you’re buried in email, they probably are too.