Notes · Note 07
Get your inbox down to thirty minutes
Three passes a day, AI on the long replies, and the parts we deliberately stopped automating.
The short version
- Batch email into three sweeps instead of living in it.
- Let AI draft the long replies. You write the short ones faster than you can prompt.
- Nothing sends without a human reading it. Ever.
Email is not a volume problem, it is an interruption problem. The fix is batching it into a few passes and letting AI take the part that actually eats time — the considered replies — while you keep the part it cannot do, which is deciding what matters.
Morning: the fastest pass
Top to bottom, sorting only. Anything answerable in one line, answer now. Anything needing thought, flag it. Anything needing nothing, archive it. No real writing in this pass — you are triaging, not working.
Midday: let it draft the long ones
Take the flagged pile and hand the hard ones over one at a time, with the thread pasted in.
You will edit every one of these. That is the point — editing a decent draft takes a fraction of the time that staring at an empty reply box does.
Close of day: finish the pile
One last sweep so the inbox is empty or explicitly deferred. The goal is not inbox zero as a trophy. It is that nothing arrives tomorrow that you have already read three times.
Weekly: the deferred list
Everything you pushed gets one review a week. Most of it resolved itself. That review is also where you notice the same question arriving over and over, which is the signal it belongs in a template, an FAQ, or on your website.
Auto-send, deep auto-filing into folder trees, and AI replies to anyone upset. The first two cost more trust and time than they saved. The third is how a complaint becomes a public review.
The line that does not move
Draft, review, send. Every disaster story we have heard about AI and email starts with somebody switching off the middle step.