Universal
Three of today's forty emails need you; here they are
Point a shared alias at the agent's address, or connect your own mailbox, and get one daily list: what needs a decision, what needs a reply this week, and what has now been waiting nine days.
A shared inbox is everyone's job, which makes it nobody's. The message that needed a decision on Monday is on page two by Thursday, and the person who finally answers it is whoever feels guilty first.
How it works
- 01
Give the agent its own address instead: a forwarding rule in Outlook or Gmail sends mail to it, CC it on threads, or point the shared alias straight at it. Or skip the forwarding entirely: connect your own mailbox, Google Workspace authorizes natively with granular read-only permissions, and Microsoft 365 or other providers connect when IMAP access is enabled on the account, and the agent sweeps the inbox itself on a schedule. Every message gets sorted into buckets you define together, needs a decision from you, needs a reply this week, informational, ignore, and a desk table keeps one row per open item with sender, subject, bucket, and age. The daily summary is deliberately short: the three things that need you today, what got filed, and the one item that has now been waiting nine days.
- 02
Memory does the part a rota never manages. Senders you always answer first float up; the newsletter nobody has opened since January stops appearing at all. What this replaces is not a tool, it is the half-hire you were about to make to keep the inbox from rotting.