5 AI tools that actually make resident and fellow life easier (and save you money)
I used to spend Sunday nights dreading Monday morning. Not because of the clinical care. Because of everything else. The (many, many) emails I hadn't read. The research I was supposed to be keeping up with. The basic adulting things I just didn’t get to over the weekend. The vacation coming up that I didn’t have time to plan. The investment account I hadn't opened since before fellowship started.
If you're in residency or fellowship, you know the feeling. You're working somewhere between 60 and 80 hours a week, and whatever's left goes to sleep, food, and if you’re lucky making some time for your friends and family. According to a 2025 survey by Panacea Financial, residents average 64.7 hours per week with the majority of our time being spent on non-patient facing tasks. The math isn't pretty.
What really changed the game for me was letting AI handle much of the low-stakes cognitive load so I could save my brain for work that actually requires it. In the clinical setting, AI documentations tools cut documentation time by nearly 10% and have done wonders for clinician burn-out. But these tools can be slow to adopt and don’t fix all the problems of medical training. In the non-clinical setting, AI can be used for just about anything - any using it for just about anything is how I get my free time back. For $20 per month - I have an email organizer, news reporter, study assistant, grocery shopper all in one. And you totally can too.
Here are some of the tools that I now use on a daily basis:
Tool 1: A daily morning brief that cuts through the noise
Most mornings during fellowship, I'd open my phone and get swamped by general news, social media updates, and a pile of email newsletters I'd been meaning to unsubscribe from for months. By the time I got to the hospital I'd absorbed a lot of noise and very little of anything useful.
What I do now: a scheduled AI task that runs every morning and sends me one focused email. Mine pulls together world news, cardiology updates, sports scores from the previous day. Instead of trying to read 10 emails in the morning - I now get one email with all of the information I need.
I started this four months ago. I spend less than five minutes on news in the morning now, versus the 20-30 minutes I was burning before. What surprised me was that I retain more of what I read, not less — because it's curated instead of firehosed.
Setting it up takes about 20 minutes the first time. After that, it runs itself. You can configure it through Claude, ChatGPT, or any AI platform with scheduling or automation built in.
Tool 2: New papers in your specialty, delivered weekly
Honest admission: I went a very long time during my first year of fellowship without reading a single journal article, because I didn't have a system. Not one. When I did read, I'd spend 45 minutes hunting for something relevant, then another 30 actually reading it, then realize it didn't apply to anything on my current service.
I now have a weekly scheduled task that searches PubMed for newly published articles and related sources for recent high-impact papers in my subspecialty, summarizes the key points, and sends them to my inbox every Monday.
This is one of the automations built into my own Cowork setup. I've read more relevant literature in the past three months than I did in my entire first year. That's not a small thing going into boards.
Residents can set this up for any specialty. The AI doesn't care whether you're in emergency medicine or psychiatry — it just does the search, writes the summary, and sends it. You read for five minutes and stay current.
Tool 3: Board review questions on demand
Board prep during fellowship is its own kind of stress. You're supposed to be studying while also doing fellowship. The standard advice — "chip away at a question bank every day" — assumes you have consistent 30-minute blocks of focused time. Most of us don't.
What works better: asking AI to generate a few board-style questions every day on topics that will actually be covered in the boards.
This isn't a replacement for a structured question bank. You still need one of those (which you can also do with AI). But as a daily reinforcement tool it takes 10 minutes, doesn't need carved-out study time, and feels less like homework.
Tool 4: A weekly email with your investment updates
It wouldn’t be a Making It Through Medicine post if I didn’t highlight how something can benefit your life outside the hospital. My goal here is to have really good doctors have really good lives outside the hospital - and a lot of that comes from financial freedom. There are many weeks where I just frankly don’t have the time to check my investment accounts. With an actively managed portfolio like mine, this can be a problem.
I set up a weekly automated email that gives me a plain-language summary of my accounts: what changed, what the market did, whether there's anything requiring action. Most weeks the answer is no — and knowing that is genuinely useful information. It removes a thing that was quietly generating anxiety in the background without requiring any active engagement from me.
The goal isn't daily changes to your investment portfolio. What you want is to stay loosely informed at a pace that's sustainable, so money stays on your radar without eating cognitive bandwidth you don't have. This tool does exactly that.
Tool 5: Automated grocery ordering
Okay, hear my out. This is literally the best thing ever. This is the tool that makes the biggest concrete difference in my week. Seriously, it completely takes a big part of the mental load away from me.
During fellowship, groceries fall into one of two failure modes. Either you don't go, and you end up eating whatever's available in the hospital at 8pm, plus DoorDash three times a week. Or you go, and you're wandering a Whole Foods on a Thursday evening when you've already hungry and your brain has checked out
What I do now: a scheduled AI task generates my grocery list based on my usual preferences (with a focus on realistic meals for someone who has maybe 25 minutes to cook on a weekday), then places the order for delivery. It runs automatically each week. The groceries show up. I don't make decisions about it.
I've been doing this for three months. I eat better, spend less on impulse takeout, and recovered about two hours per week that used to go to shopping logistics. Two hours doesn't sound like much. But when two hours is most of your free evening, it's everything.
The delivery markup compared to shopping in-store is real but modest. On a $60-80 order, fees and tips typically add $10-20. This is a price I’m willing to pay to have those hours and the brain space back.
Putting the numbers together
A Claude Pro or ChatGPT Plus subscription runs $20/month. For me, this automation is completely worth it. I’ve been able to do so much with these subscriptions. Here’s an estimate breakdown:
Morning Brief: saves me about 30 minutes per day
Weekly paper digest: replaces 1-2 hours of unstructured searching
Board questions: prepares me for upcoming board exam in less than 10 minutes per day
Grocery automation: gives me back 2+ hours on my day off
Call it 4-7 hours per week conservatively. At a fellow's effective hourly rate, that's $88-154 per week in time recovered. Monthly, $350-600 in time value. Against $20.
The burnout numbers matter too. UCLA's study found AI adoption dropped physician burnout from 52% to 39%. The researchers noted that reducing low-stakes cognitive load made physicians more present in the clinical moments that count. You can't really put a number on that. But if you're in year three of a fellowship and running on fumes, you know what it means.
How to start
Start with the morning brief. It's the easiest to configure and you get daily feedback that this is actually working. Once you're in the habit of trusting AI with low-stakes tasks, the others follow naturally.
The whole setup — morning brief, paper digest, board questions, investment email, grocery order — takes about two hours on a weekend to configure initially. Everything after that is automated.
If you want to know more about how my specific setup works, stay tuned for a course that will be show you how to do all these automations. And if you've found your own tools that have helped, I'd genuinely like to hear.
One last thing
A lot of the exhaustion in residency and fellowship isn't the clinical work. It's the weight of a personal life you don't have the bandwidth to run properly. Groceries undone, finances ignored, news unread, literature piling up. That stuff doesn't feel like the point, and it isn't. But it accumulates, and it takes a real toll.
Twenty dollars a month doesn't fix any of that structurally. But it can take several hours of logistical weight off your week, consistently, without requiring discipline or willpower on your end. That's worth something.
If you're looking for more on surviving (and actually not hating) medical training, there's more at Making It Through Medicine.
