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Work · Recipe

Morning inbox triage in 15 minutes.

Sort the morning's inbox into act, wait or archive. Paste subject lines only — never the bodies.

Time: ~15 min Cadence: daily or as needed For: anyone whose inbox is heavier than the day is Cost: free tier of any chat AI

The recipe

1. Open a chat and paste this opener

The opener sets up the model as a metadata-only classifier. You never paste email bodies. You paste one line per email — sender, subject, rough age — and the model decides. If it can't decide, it says so and you handle that one yourself.

You're going to help me triage my inbox. I'll paste emails in batches. One line per email, in this format: #. sender | subject | age Where age is today, yesterday, this-week or older. HOW TO WORK WITH ME - For each email, one line back: number, decision, 2-4 word reason. No preamble. - Decisions are one of: ACT — needs a reply or action from me today WAIT — someone else's turn, or waiting on info ARCH — no action, safe to archive ASK — you can't tell from the metadata; I'll decide - Judge from sender + subject shape, not from urgency words. "URGENT", "quick question", "ASAP" in a subject line means nothing on its own. - I'll tell you my trusted senders in the first batch — treat those with more weight. WHEN I SAY "SUMMARISE" Give me: - Totals: X ACT, Y WAIT, Z ARCH, N ASK. - The ACT list only, in the order you'd tackle it. For each, a suggested one-line reply if a reply is what's needed. Ready. First batch coming, with my trusted senders at the top.

2. Paste your inbox as one-liners

Start with a line like: Trusted senders: Jane (CEO), Priya (co-founder), any customer email. Then the batch. In Gmail or Outlook, select the emails, copy, and edit the paste down to one line each. Or write a quick shortcut. Either way, thirty seconds of formatting saves you the rest of the morning.

3. Read the classifications and adjust

If it mislabels something obvious, tell it once — "anything from Priya is at least ACT" — and it'll correct for the rest of the session. Don't argue email by email.

4. Say "summarise" and act

You'll get the ACT list in priority order. Do those. Archive the ARCH pile in one bulk action. WAIT can sit. ASK gets handled by you, not the model.

What done looks like

A short ACT list with suggested first-line replies, a WAIT list you're not going to think about again today and an empty ARCH pile. Fifteen minutes.

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Data quality

Sender plus subject is enough for most emails. The rest is honesty about who matters and who doesn't.

  • Name your trusted senders explicitly at the top of the first batch. Otherwise the model can't tell the CEO from the LinkedIn digest.
  • If a subject line is genuinely opaque ("re: the thing"), don't guess at the body for the model. Mark it ASK and open it yourself.
  • Age matters. A subject that reads urgent from today is different from the same subject from three weeks ago. Include the age line.
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Security

This is the recipe where security actually bites. The whole point of the metadata-first shape is that you never share what you shouldn't.

  • Never paste email bodies. Not the first line, not a paragraph, not a quote. If the model can't decide from the subject, it goes in the ASK pile — that's what ASK is for.
  • Never paste attachments. Or filenames if they contain client names, deal codes or anything sensitive.
  • Anything about a specific customer, patient, candidate or minor doesn't go in at all. Not the subject, not the sender. Handle those yourself.
  • If you're on a work account, check whether AI chats are logged. Many are. Behave accordingly — this recipe is designed to be safe even if they are, but only if you follow the metadata-only rule.
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Test it worked

Two minutes of checks before you commit to the plan for the morning.

  • Scan the ACT list. Is anything on there that isn't really today? Downgrade.
  • Scan the ARCH pile once. If you spot anything you'd regret losing, pull it back and mark it ASK. The archive shouldn't be a graveyard.
  • Look at ASK. Anything you know is urgent that ended up here means your subject lines don't carry enough signal. That's a note to self about your outbound subjects, not the model's fault.

Why this works

Four things are doing the work. All of them transfer to any triage job — support tickets, PR reviews, a backlog of Slack DMs.

  • Metadata-first is a real security posture. You're deciding what information the job actually needs — the answer is less than most people assume. That's a habit worth building.
  • Categories with clean semantics beat "important vs unimportant". ACT / WAIT / ARCH / ASK each map to a physical action. There's nowhere to hide.
  • Naming trusted senders up front replaces a whole class of context. The model doesn't need to know Jane is the CEO — it needs to know Jane's emails are weighted higher.
  • The "URGENT means nothing" line inverts a common failure mode. Left to itself, the model would take those words at face value. You told it not to.

Bend it by changing the categories. Support tickets might want ACT / ESCALATE / MERGE / CLOSE. GitHub notifications might want REVIEW / WATCH / DROP. Same shape, different verbs.

Learn the underlying skill

The modules that map to this recipe: