How I Triage My Inbox With Claude Every Morning

The problem

Email piles up. Decisions get buried in it.

The real cost of email isn't the volume. It's that decisions and newsletters and FYIs all look the same in a list view. You open the app, you see 47 unread messages, and somewhere in there are three things that are actually blocking other people — but you have to read through booking confirmations and team announcements to find them.

I spent years trying to solve this with filters, folders, and priority flags. None of it stuck. Filters require maintenance. Folders require clicking. Flags get ignored after the first week. What I needed wasn't a better filing system. I needed something that could read the inbox and tell me which three things I actually had to deal with this morning.

That's Claude's job now.

The setup

A system prompt that knows what "needs a decision" means

The setup is a single system prompt I keep in a text file and paste into a fresh Claude session each morning. The prompt does two things: it defines the three categories, and it defines what counts as a decision for my specific work context.

Generic category definitions don't work. If you tell Claude "decisions needed means emails requiring a response," it flags everything. You have to define it specifically — "a decision is something where another person is blocked until I answer, or where I need to choose between options with real consequences." That level of specificity is what separates a useful triage from an aggressive flagging machine.

You are my inbox triage assistant.

Sort each email I give you into exactly one of three categories:

DECISION NEEDED — Someone is blocked waiting for my answer, OR I need
to choose between options with real consequences (money, commitments,
people's time). This is a small category. When in doubt, it doesn't
belong here.

NEEDS REPLY — Someone asked me something or needs acknowledgment, but
nothing is blocked. I can reply same day or tomorrow with no damage.

CAN IGNORE — Newsletters, announcements, receipts, confirmations, FYIs,
automated notifications, or anything where no reply is expected.

For each email, output:
[CATEGORY] — Sender: Subject
One sentence: why this category.

Be conservative with DECISION NEEDED. Flagging too much there defeats
the purpose.
      

The routine

What the actual morning looks like

I open my email client, switch to list view, and select all unread from the last 18 hours. I copy the visible subject lines and senders — I don't open anything yet. I paste that list into Claude with the system prompt loaded. Claude returns a sorted list in about 10 seconds.

I read the DECISION NEEDED items first. Usually two or three. I handle those before I open anything else. Then I work through NEEDS REPLY in order. CAN IGNORE I delete without opening, or archive in a batch at the end of the day.

The whole triage takes under five minutes. The email app stays closed while I do actual work. I open it again mid-afternoon for a second pass.

"The triage doesn't replace reading email. It replaces the part where you open everything looking for the thing that matters."

Tuning it

What Claude gets wrong at first — and how to fix it

In the first week, Claude over-flags. It will put invoice follow-ups in DECISION NEEDED when they belong in NEEDS REPLY. It will flag "quick question" subject lines as decisions when they're actually just conversation. This is fixable.

When Claude miscategorizes something, I note the correction at the end of the session: "the invoice follow-up wasn't a decision, it was a reply — update your working model." Then I add a specific example to the system prompt as a calibration case. After doing this for a few days, accuracy improves substantially. My current prompt has four calibration examples at the bottom — real emails I'd previously had to correct.

The other thing to tune: what counts as "needs reply." If you're senior enough that social emails genuinely don't need replies, move them to CAN IGNORE explicitly. Claude defaults to flagging anything where a human said something pleasant as needing acknowledgment. Tell it otherwise.

Next step

Book 1 covers the full workflow

Inbox triage is one piece of how I use Claude to structure the workday. Book 1 covers the end-to-end morning routine — session loading, task prioritization, communication triage, and how to keep context across the day without losing your place. If this pattern is useful, the book goes much deeper.

Read Book 1 →