47 Minutes for One Email
Last Tuesday, I watched a Head of School draft an email about a bullying incident. She knew what to say. The facts were clear. But getting the tone right—firm yet empathetic, clear yet diplomatic—meant drafting, deleting, and second-guessing every sentence.
Forty-seven minutes. One email.
I used to do the same thing. A difficult parent email would eat an hour. A crisis communication to the Board would consume an evening. My Google Drive held a folder called "Templates" with thirty-seven files, no clear naming convention, and half of them outdated.
The breakthrough came when I stopped treating operational writing as creative expression.
Most school communication follows predictable patterns. Crisis holding statements. Difficult conversation openers. Board updates. Parent concern responses. Weekly staff emails. These aren't novels. They're blueprints.
A Different Kind of Dashboard
My current system isn't a folder of Google Docs. It's a Private Dashboard with interactive prompts I can customize in seconds.
The workflow: Open the dashboard. Click "Copy." Paste into Claude or directly into email. Fill in the specific details.
What changes isn't just speed. The real shift is cognitive. When structure is handled, judgment gets your full attention—and judgment is the part that actually requires you to be present.
Research on decision fatigue suggests we make worse decisions as the day progresses, not from tiredness but because each decision depletes a finite resource (Baumeister et al., 2007). Templates eliminate low-value structural decisions so you have capacity left for high-stakes ones.
Five Scripts I Use Weekly
These templates emerged from hundreds of real situations during my years as a Head of School. Each one addresses a communication type that recurs constantly and carries significant weight.
The Crisis Holding Statement
Situation: Something bad happened—injury, rumor, safety concern. You don't have all the facts, but the WhatsApp groups are already buzzing.
Purpose: Buy time without admitting fault or creating panic.
Structure:
- Acknowledge the situation exists (don't pretend ignorance)
- State what you're doing right now
- Promise a follow-up by a specific time
- Close with reassurance about student safety
Parents don't expect immediate answers. They expect evidence of control. The holding statement signals control without overcommitting.
💡 Specificity beats vagueness
Never promise "more information soon." Promise "an update by 3:00 PM today." Vague timelines breed anxiety; specific ones build trust.
The Difficult Conversation Opener
Situation: You're 10 minutes away from delivering a performance warning, terminating a contract, or navigating any high-emotion conversation.
Purpose: Generate an opening script so you don't fumble the first two minutes—where most difficult conversations derail.
I've detailed this approach in my post on AI for difficult conversations. The principle: AI doesn't have the conversation. It helps you prepare so you walk in calm and clear.
Structure:
- Opening statement (direct, no small-talk softening)
- The specific behavior or situation
- The impact on students, team, or school
- What happens next
- Space for their response
The One-Page Board Report
Situation: Monthly governance updates.
Purpose: Prevent the 10-page novel. The template enforces four sections: Metrics, Strategic Priorities, Wins, Risks.
I've written separately about the Board Report template because it's one of the highest-leverage documents a Head produces. A focused Board report takes 30 minutes to write and earns 12 months of trust.
The Weekly Update Architecture
Situation: Friday afternoon, time to communicate what happened this week and what's coming.
Purpose: Ensure you communicate decisions, not just events.
Structure:
- One sentence: What we decided this week
- One sentence: What's happening next week
- One sentence: What you need to do (if anything)
- One sentence: Where to go with questions
Most weekly updates read like event logs. "On Monday we had an assembly. On Tuesday we had a fire drill." That's not leadership communication—it's a calendar dump. The template forces extraction of decisions from noise.
The Parent Concern Response
Situation: A parent emails with a complaint about a grade, a teacher, a policy, or another student.
Purpose: Acknowledge without agreeing, investigate without promising, close without escalating.
This template sees the most use. My full approach appears in the post on AI-assisted parent communication.
Structure:
- Thank them for reaching out (not "sorry you feel that way")
- Confirm your understanding of their concern
- State what you will do next and by when
- Offer a follow-up path if needed
⚠️ Resist the urge to solve immediately
Your job in email #1 is to acknowledge and investigate. Solving too fast often means solving wrong.
The Numbers
I tracked this for a month.
The value exceeds time savings. When structure is handled, cognitive load drops. Focus goes entirely to judgment—the work that actually needs a human.
Building Your Library
You don't need five templates this week. You need one.
Week one: Identify the communication you write most often. Draft a template. Use it twice.
Month one: Add two templates for your highest-stakes communications.
Quarter one: Build or adopt a dashboard for one-click access.
The objective isn't automated communication. It's automated structure so your judgment can do its job.
The Dashboard
I've packaged these templates—with the AI prompts that power them—into a free toolkit.
It's not a PDF. It's the interactive dashboard I use daily.
Want help building systems like this for your organization?
Get the 15+ Copy-Paste Prompts in the ToolkitReferences
- The Strength Model of Self-Control - Baumeister, R.F., Vohs, K.D., & Tice, D.M., Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2007
