Stop 2 of 7 · Daily
The inbox, twice a day
Two fifteen-minute batches that turn 90 unread into a task list, three replies and a waiting-for list.
Two batches, not two hundred interruptions
Alex gets around ninety emails a day: carriers, customers, the nine reports, a director who writes in one-line questions. Read as they land, they cost the whole day and produce nothing. Read twice, at 08:30 and 15:30, they cost thirty minutes.
The batch is not about reading faster. It is about sorting once. Ninety messages contain maybe four that need Alex to think, a dozen that need a sentence, a handful that belong to someone else, and the rest is noise or waiting. Claude does the sort. Alex does the four.
The four buckets
| Bucket | What Alex does with it |
|---|---|
| Needs a decision | Blocks the calendar for it, or answers now if it is small |
| Needs a reply | Reads the draft, changes two words, sends |
| Delegate | Forwards with a name, a date and one sentence of context |
| Waiting for | Adds to the list, chases only when it is late |
Try this
The morning batch
Read my inbox since 17:00 yesterday. Split it into four lists: needs a decision from me, needs a short reply, can be delegated and to whom, waiting on someone else. For each item give one line and the sender's initials. Anything from a customer or a carrier with a date in it goes at the top of its list. Do not reply to anything yet.
The three replies
From that first list, pick the three that unblock the most people and draft a reply for each. Four sentences maximum. Answer the actual question in the first sentence, give a specific date for anything I am promising, end with my first name. Leave them as drafts and list every fact you assumed so I can check it before I send.
The waiting-for list
Go through my Sent mail for the last 14 days and find everything I asked someone for. Build a table: who, what I asked for, the date I asked, whether they replied, days waiting. Sort by days waiting. For anything over five days, draft a two-line nudge that repeats one specific detail from my original message.