Full transcript
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You are not an email server. Stop pretending to be one. Most of us spend the first ninety minutes of every workday doing a job we were never hired for: reading, sorting, and routing email. The actual work gets pushed to the afternoon, where it competes with the crash.
In this workflow we hand the first two passes to a model. The triage prompt classifies every email into one of five buckets (decide, reply, forward, file, ignore) with a one-line summary and a reason. That alone saves most of the hour. Then we layer a draft-generation prompt on top of the "reply" bucket.
The drafts never get sent automatically. They land in your Drafts folder, waiting for you to read, adjust, and send. The review is your actual job. You look at the three "decide" emails, you read the pre-drafted replies, and you ship. Ten minutes.
One note on voice. Models drift. Every two weeks, run the "does this sound like me" test: paste a draft to a colleague who knows your writing and ask them to rate it. If they can't tell, ship it.
You're not an email server. Stop pretending to be one. This workflow turns your first hour of the day into ten minutes of decisions, with drafts already queued for the forty-seven replies you weren't going to write well anyway.
Why this lands
Inbox-zero purists will tell you the answer is discipline. It isn't. The answer is delegation, and for the first time, you have a delegate that works for fractions of a cent per email and never asks for a raise. The catch is the delegate is bad at tone and can't read your mind. That's what the prompts below are for.