SMEMindsProductivity · Beginner · about 18 minutes
Email — triage 60 messages in 6 minutes, then draft the 12 that matter
Sixty messages overnight. You open the first, decide whether it matters, reply, open the second, decide, reply. Ninety minutes later you are on message thirty-four, the important one from message fifty-one is still unread, and your actual work has not started.
- You need
- Role: Founder, 25-person IT services company, Hyderabad. Urgent this week: closing the Q4 renewal with Tarang Systems; hiring two developers.
- Tool
- Any assistant, pasting sender + subject + first line
- You get
- A — NEEDS ME PERSONALLY Tarang Systems | Re: Renewal terms | Your top priority this week B — ROUTINE REPLY Priya | Leave request 18–22 March | Approve, check project cover CloudHost | Invoice #4471 due | Confirm receipt, forward accounts C — ACTION, NO REPLY Naukri | 14 new applications | Screen…
- Time saved
- Typical manager: 95 minutes a day to 25–35. Roughly 250 hours a year.
- 1Collect headers
- 2Triage into four
- 3Handle the personal five
- 4Batch-draft the routine
- 5Review as one pass
- 6Send
- 7Archive
- 8Log recurring types
Check the output
- Read the unsure list first. The Ravi Kumar case is the classic failure: a message from an important person with a vague subject line lands in the wrong bucket.
- Spot-check three messages in bucket D. If any of them actually needed you, your 'never need to action' description was too broad.
- In the drafts, search for any date, price or quantity. Confirm each one came from you rather than from the model.
- Check every [I NEED:] marker is resolved before sending. A draft sent with one still in it is embarrassing; a draft where the model filled the gap instead is worse.