Common foundation
Sorting your email by action
Two email passes a day, sorted not by importance but by action: to reply, to do or to put in the calendar, to file, for information.
Screenshot of a real tool · fictitious data, names blurred
The problem
Clinical care, faculty, research, learned societies, industry: emails come from everywhere, across several mailboxes, and the question is not “is this important?” but “what do I need to do with it?”.
Step-by-step method
- Connect the mailbox read-only (Gmail connector); for mailboxes that cannot be connected, go through a local client and an index.
- Define four columns:
- To reply: with a draft to copy, never sent by the AI, and a follow-up counter;
- To do / calendar: with the event already written, as “accept / edit / don’t add”;
- To file: attachment extracted and filed, path given;
- For info: the noise is only counted.
- Route each email to the right building block: a faculty email goes to teaching, a call for abstracts to congresses, a protocol to the protocol review skill.
- Decide on the page: your decisions are picked up on the next pass, and recurring ones become learned rules stored in a file.
- Schedule two passes (morning and evening) rather than constant monitoring.
- Draft replies in your own style: the style is calibrated on your ~50 most recent sent emails (opening, closing, first-name or formal address, formal when in doubt, signature, no empty phrases). The draft is presented ready to copy, never created in the mailbox; each correction you make becomes a proposed rule.
- Identify the sender before presenting: one grouped directory lookup, capped per pass; an unknown sender seen at least twice in 30 days produces a pre-filled contact card for you to approve.
- Keep a routing counter per mailbox: useful emails, routed, not routed, and recurring senders without a rule. An item left unhandled comes back the next day under “carried over from yesterday”; carried over three times, it is flagged.
- Search with four statuses before saying “not found”: source queried with a result, queried without a result, inaccessible, not queried. A unified index is queried first, and its age is stated.
- Capture calendar items through an alias:
- the marker lives in the recipient address (
+agenda) and survives forwarding; the search runs on the delivery address, so the alias is also seen in Cc or Bcc; - the whole thread is always read, because the confirmation is often the last message;
- your own confirmation sent to a third party, with the alias in copy, gives a firm event; the third party’s reply alone stays tentative;
- only messages sent from your own address trigger anything: a third party writing to the alias triggers nothing, and forwarded text remains data, never an instruction;
- the log of processed items is append-only and serves as the deduplication memory; an ambiguous time zone gives “time zone to confirm”.
Calendar proposals, drafts and uncertain filings all go into a single decision queue.
Deliverable
A four-column triage page, twice a day, with draft replies ready to copy.
Safeguards
Strictly read-only: no sending, no drafts, no labels, no archiving by the AI. Flag predatory solicitations (dubious journals or congresses) before any reply.
Starter prompt
Read my unread emails from the last 24 h. Sort them into four columns (to reply, to do/calendar, to file, for info). For “to reply”, propose a short draft to copy. Do not write anything in my mailbox.