The Short Version · 1 min read
You have an email you've been putting off — not because it's hard to write, but because you can't find the right way to start it. A simple prompt gets you from a messy first attempt to something you'd actually send.
A client needs to hear that a project is running two weeks late. Or a new lead needs a follow-up that doesn't sound desperate. Or a vendor needs to be told a rate isn't working anymore. These emails are short — five or six sentences, tops — but they sit in the drafts folder for a day, sometimes two, while everything else in the inbox gets answered first. The delay isn't about being busy. It's that starting the sentence feels harder than anything else on the to-do list, and every hour it waits, the conversation it's putting off gets a little more overdue.
“The hard part was never the writing. It was starting.”
Type out what you want to say, roughly, no matter how blunt or messy — then hand it this:
“Turn this into a short, direct, professional email. Keep what I actually mean — don't soften the bad news or add filler. Just make it something I'd feel comfortable hitting send on.”
The rough version doesn't need to be good. It just needs to exist. This prompt's only job is to take you from a messy first attempt to something sendable, in one pass.
The next time an email has been sitting unsent for more than a day, that's the signal — not that you're avoiding the person, but that you're avoiding the blank page. Get something rough down first, however ugly, and let a second pass clean it up. The hard part was never the writing. It was starting.
