Maria runs a 4-person accounting office. Every morning she opened her inbox to 47 unread emails. Sorting, replying, forwarding — it took her 90 minutes before she did any actual work. Last month she set up two things. Now it takes 20 minutes.
Here's exactly what she did.
The problem
Email isn't the work. It's the administration of the work. Yet most of us spend the first hour of every day inside it — reactive, scattered, already behind before we've started anything real.
The average professional spends 2.5 hours per day on email. That's 28% of a working week. Gone.
The fix
Two things — no apps to buy, no complex setup.
Step 1 — The triage prompt
Open Claude or ChatGPT. Paste any email you've received and use this:
"Summarize this email in one sentence. Tell me: does it need a reply today, this week, or never? If it needs a reply, draft one in under 50 words."
Do this for every email in batches of 5. What used to take 3 minutes per email takes 20 seconds.
Step 2 — The template folder
Look at your last 30 sent emails. You'll find you're writing the same 6–8 replies repeatedly — meeting confirmations, follow-ups, "I'll get back to you by Friday." Write them once as templates in a Google Doc. Paste, adjust name, send.
Combined: 90 minutes becomes 20.
Steal this prompt
"Read this email thread and draft a 3-sentence reply that: confirms receipt, asks the one question needed to move forward, and keeps a professional but warm tone. Max 60 words."
Copy it. Use it today.
One-liner
My spam folder has better subject lines than most newsletters I'm subscribed to. Make of that what you will.
Before you go
Every Tuesday at 8:30am CET I send one specific problem that's eating time in your business — and the exact AI workflow that solves it. No theory, no hype. Just something you can use that day.
If this was useful, you'll want the next one.
— George