Welcome to Prompt, Tinker, Innovate—my AI playground. Each edition gives you one hands-on prompt designed to help you think more clearly, cut busywork, and move faster on the work that matters.
This week's playground: Let AI triage your inbox and draft the email you've been avoiding
Most people start the day the same way.
Open email. Feel behind before anything has happened. Answer the easy stuff first. Spend 45 minutes clearing low-stakes replies while the important thread — the one that needs a decision — sits unopened.
AI can do more than write a cleaner email. It can read what's waiting, rank what matters, and point you to the message that needs your attention first.
Why this matters
Inbox triage is one of those tasks that sounds simple but quietly eats your day. You scan, you flag, you re-scan, you defer. You tell yourself you'll come back to the hard one after coffee, after the next meeting, after you clear the smaller asks.
By then, the day has already started making decisions for you.
This prompt gives AI a narrow job: sort the pile, identify what needs action, and draft a first pass for the message you're avoiding. You still make the call. AI handles the first pass.
Your AI experiment: Try this prompt
👉 Time to tinker: Paste the prompt below into Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, or Copilot. Business versions of Gemini and Copilot have Gmail and Outlook access built in. If you're using Claude or ChatGPT, you'll need to enable the Gmail or Outlook integration first—look for it under your account settings or connected apps.
📝 Prompt:
Review all [unread] emails in my inbox from the last [48 hours]. Then: 1. Sort them by urgency—flag anything that needs a response or decision today 2. Identify the single most overdue or high-stakes item I'm avoiding 3. Draft a response to that one item—direct, no filler, under 150 words Do not send anything. Show me the draft first.
💡 Pro tip: The same prompt works anywhere you have a backlog
The real trick is not the inbox. It's the structure. Ask AI to review a backlog, rank what matters, and draft the first next step.
- Slack: Review all unread messages in my Slack from the last 48 hours.
- Calendar: Review all meetings on my calendar this week.
- Project management (Asana, Linear, Jira): Review all tasks assigned to me that are overdue or due this week.
You can also combine sources: "Review my unread email, Slack messages, calendar, and assigned tasks. Identify what needs my attention today, rank the top five items, and suggest the first action for each."
What did you discover?
Did AI surface the email you already knew you were avoiding? Did the draft actually sound like you—or did it need work? Reply and let me know. I'm especially curious whether the urgency ranking matched your own instincts, or surprised you.
📩 See you next week—with another experiment worth trying.
