Spillin' the Tea on the Timesaving Magic of Shortwave

You'll want to kiss it on the mouth for what it does to your email.

Image by author, created with AI.

🐰🕳️ This post is part of the How to Get AI to Do Your Laundry Series. To view every use case under the sun—at a glance—go here.

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Do you process a lot of email?

Maybe you’re a corporate copywriter juggling multiple projects and the 4th “this could’ve been an email” meeting request this week.

Or a mom of three coordinating cheerleading practice, dentist appointments and the chaperone list for the museum field trip like it’s NASA mission control.

Or maybe you’re a solopreneur wearing all the hats—marketing director, client liaison, tech support and the person who has to apologize when “tech support” forgets to attach the file.

Whatever your role in life, one thing seems universal: your inbox isn’t just a communication tool—it’s a source of existential dread.

If this is true for you, say hello to my little fren, Shortwave. 👋🏼

It’s the magical AI bot that I discovered while drafting this magnum opus (that I highly suggest you read, only because it will completely transform your life):

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Shortwave revolutionized my days, and that’s no exaggeration. One of my clients has rapidly expanded and assigned me to a dozen new initiatives that were previously not my responsibility. When I met Shortwave, I was having heart palpitations from unprocessed emails that went back for two months.

Now I am, quite literally, excited to face my inbox in the morning because I know it will handle my shit in 15 minutes or less. And, never one to hoard intel that can help us all reclaim time for joy, I simply had to share Shortwave with you.

✨ Be sure to read to the end if you want to learn how to get a robot to do your taxes.

Here’s how Shortwave is changing the game:

Organize Your Inbox Without the Overwhelm 🤯

Auto-prioritize urgent stuff. Simply ask, "What are the most important emails today?" And it somehow magically KNOWS.

Teach it to archive certain threads like those Bob sneezed on the spreadsheet again emails your team insists on CCing you on. Shortwave actually learns what you like and goes straight to your preferred action in the future.

Clean junk and promotional emails. Adieu, World Market. For the LOVE OF GOD, send. less. email.

The best part? Shortwave has a sixth sense about the worst perpetrators and will unsubscribe you automatically if you wish.¹

🩵 My personal fave, turn emails into to-dos. “Set a reminder to check back with Julia about the rehearsal by Friday.”

Poof. Done. I can work on action items straight out of my inbox or transfer bigger tasks to my Trello Project Manager.

Respond, but Make it Easy

Finish your drafts. Did you get distracted by a squirrel in the middle of writing your response again?

Me too, friend. Me too.

Now you can simply say to Shortwave, "Complete the email I’ve drafted to John, and address every open question."

Auto-generate diplomatic replies. Need to politely push back on a request without seeming uncooperative? Those are the emails I perseverate on FOREVER.

But no more. Now I ask Shortwave to reply in a professional tone, while holding firm to my boundaries, et voila, an email I didn’t have to spend 43 minutes overthinking.

Fix grammar and spelling. Y’all are writers, so this is probably a non-issue, but it’s nice to know that if you’re cranking out responses in beast mode, someone is making sure autocorrect didn’t change “manuscript” to “anus riot.”

Pull context and write updates. Working on a project with a lot of moving parts? Ask Shortwave to find emails about Project Whatsamajiggy and write a draft addressing everything that’s still outstanding.

Understand Emails at a Glance

Summarize long threads. Shortwave is your TL;DR wiz kid. Say, "Give me a bullet point list of the action items in this thread," then go take a nap.

Pull key details across multiple emails. You know the info you need is in your inbox somewhere, and when you do find the right thread(?), it’s still missing details. Skip over all that nonsense by asking Shortwave to "List the event dates discussed in all of Claire’s emails."

Translate content. Not a use case I’ve tried, but it would’ve come in really handy that time we made a dinner reservation in Paris and got an emailed confirmation in French confirming we were waitlisted. Our travel companion saw the word “confirmé” and assumed we were good.

Shortwave could’ve saved us a whole lotta cab fare that night.

Search Like a Human, Not a Database

Find details conversationally. Here’s where Shortwave really shines. You can ask, "What’s the address of the cafe where I’m meeting Jordan today?" or, "Find the thread from last year where we discussed brand values."² This is way easier than trying to remember the right keyword combination to pop into your ESP’s³ search bar.

List receipts and amounts.

I need you to pay grave attention, here. 👀

I can say, “Create a comprehensive spreadsheet with all the receipts you can find, organized by date (oldest to newest), with the following columns:

| Date | Vendor | Item/Service | Amount | Payment Method | Tax Category |”

and you guys . . . Shortwave will do my taxes!!!!!!!!

It took some finessing to figure out how to ask the question and a bit of finagling to get the copy/paste to a spreadsheet to work, but no joke, I just figured out how to get AI to do the hardest part of my taxes.

What used to take me literal days now takes less than a minute.

Somebody pinch me.

Cons

Is Shortwave perfect? No.

Like all tech, it has its ups and downs. Here are a few glitches that thwarted me, but please know that I still love this app like it’s my child.

1. Sometimes (okay, lots of times), Shortwave freezes, and you have to refresh the page and retype your query.

2. Sometimes Shortwave archives things you want trashed. Unless you have unlimited storage, this is a bad practice. Ensure it’s following your instructions to the letter. Similarly, sometimes it will file an email into a folder but leave it in the inbox. Once in a while, I have to remind it that when I file something in a folder, it’s “Done” and can be removed from my inbox. It’s iterative and it learns, but occasionally you will need to remind it of things.

3. Custom signatures are imported from your email service provider, but the default is toggled off. To turn the option on, go to Settings»Compose»Signatures or add it manually to each message by clicking this icon at the bottom of the message:

4. Scheduled emails don’t have their own folder, like they do in Gmail. If you want to see what’s scheduled, make changes or delete a scheduled draft, you have to search your Sent folder, which is not intuitive at all. Why the hell wouldn’t it be in Drafts?!! Believe you me, the developers and I have had words.

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So yeah, I’m officially a person who waxes poetic about a robot app. But when something declutters my inbox like a hulked-out Marie Kondo, I have to throw a party. If reclaiming your time and sanity sounds like a vibe, Shortwave might just be your new favorite coworker, who—bonus points—doesn’t leave shrimp-scented leftovers in the office fridge.

Tried Shortwave? Love it? Hate it? Have questions?

Let’s talk in the comments.

I’m genuinely curious how other humans make their inboxes less murdery.

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And it will be available to all my paid subscribers.

1. You know how the degree of difficult some companies make it to unsubscribe ought to be illegal? The fact that Shortwave lets you unsubscribe with one click instead of jumping through hoops makes it worth its weight in gold.

2. It’s worth noting that if you want Shortwave to go back further than 90 days, you must upgrade from free to paid.

3. email service provider