Prompts / Working prompt
The Email Triage Interview
Before you pay for any AI email tool, spend forty minutes finding out what your inbox rules actually are. This interview writes them down — and the rulebook it produces works with any tool you buy later, or any VA, or no tool at all.
Where this one comes from
When I published the email triage market map, the follow-up question I kept getting was the same one: okay, so which tool do I buy? And I kept giving the same annoying answer: I can't tell you, and neither can a demo, because you don't know your own rules yet.
Here's what I mean. When I finally wrote down the triage rules for my own operation — which messages a guest-facing VA handles, which payment emails get an immediate escalation, which senders can wait a week — the surprise wasn't the tool that would enforce them. The surprise was that a third of the email I believed only I could answer turned out to be a template, and two categories I'd been hand-sorting for years collapsed into "archive, never read." The rulebook was the asset. The tool is just an enforcer you can swap out.
Which is exactly the trap with shopping first: every AI email product will happily impose its categories on your mail. Urgent, FYI, newsletters. But "urgent" isn't a category in your business — "money moving on a deal" is. So before you give any vendor $20 a month to guess your rules, run this interview and write them down yourself. Then every demo becomes a simple test: can this tool enforce my rulebook, yes or no?
The prompt
Paste this into Claude or ChatGPT with your inbox open in the next tab — the interview will ask you to read real senders and subjects from it, not remember them. Budget 30 to 45 minutes.
Copy-paste prompt
You are my operations consultant. Before I buy any AI email tool, I want a written map of how my inbox actually works, so I can judge any tool against my real rules instead of against its demo. Interview me ONE question at a time and wait for my answer before the next one. Push back on vague answers and make me give real examples from this week's inbox, not how I imagine my email works. Part 1, volume and shape: Ask how many emails I get on a typical day, and how many in the last week truly needed me personally. Ask which addresses and accounts feed the pile (personal, business, listings, support, notifications). Then ask the money question: what is the most expensive email I was slow on in the last 90 days, and what did the delay cost? Part 2, the real categories: Ask me to open my inbox right now and read you the senders and subjects of the last 20 emails. From those, propose 5 or 6 categories that my mail actually falls into, named in my own words: not "Promotions" but things like "money moving on a deal," "tenant or guest issue," "lender paperwork," "vendor noise." Refine the list with me until every one of the 20 fits exactly one category and nothing needs a "misc" bucket. Part 3, the rules: For each category, ask me three things, one category at a time: 1. Must I personally answer this, or could a template, a VA, or silence handle it just as well? 2. How fast does it truly need a response: minutes, same day, this week, or never? 3. What would someone else need to know to handle it without me (account access, a template, a decision rule, an escalation trigger)? Challenge every "only I can do this" answer at least once. Ask what would actually break if a competent assistant answered it from a script. Then write my Email Triage Rulebook on one page: each category with its definition, three example senders or subjects, who handles it (me, template, VA, archive), the response-time rule, and the standard action or reply. Format it so I can paste it verbatim into an AI tool's instructions box or hand it to a human VA on their first day. Finish with your diagnosis, based only on my answers: is my email pain volume pain (I mostly need filtering), handling pain (I need drafting and sorting), or context pain (only something that knows my specific deals and people can fix it)? Tell me what that means about what I should buy, and what I should not pay for yet.
What you'll get out of it
A one-page triage rulebook in your own vocabulary — the document that survives every tool change you'll ever make. Plus a diagnosis that maps straight onto the three kinds of email pain from the market map: if it says volume pain, a $10 filter finishes the job this afternoon; handling pain, the $20-30 agent tier earns its keep; context pain, stop shopping, because no subscription knows your deals. Either way you'll walk into any pricing page knowing exactly what you're testing for, and you'll have onboarding day one for a VA already written.
Did the interview say context pain?
If your rulebook keeps needing lines like "unless it's about the Van Buren closing" — rules no off-the-shelf tool can hold — that's the seam where buying ends and building begins, and it's the work I do. Twenty minutes, and if the honest answer is "just get the $10 filter," that's what I'll tell you.
Read the companion post first if you haven't: Buy It Before You Build It: Email Triage. More working prompts on the prompts page.