🌎 Overview
An executive’s inbox is one of the major front doors for their lives. It’s important to establish clear guidelines for personal and professional emails right from the start.
This playbook attempts to help assistants build out a standard operating procedure (SOP) in a detailed and explicit way.
Assistants and clients should read the relevant sections below and work through the preferences templates shared above.
🔖 Goals
- The EA should develop a system in place that will save the client from having to go through or look for emails.
- For the client to be more hands-off with inbox, avoid context switching and, if necessary, they know exactly where to find items.
📋 Process for getting client’s preferences
For the EA
1. Assess the client's inbox's current status.
- How is the inbox currently being handled?
- Is there an apparent system of organization?
2. Check the emails the client is getting in the following categories:
Personal
- Subscriptions
- Newsletters
- Billing statements
- Transaction receipts
- Direct messages from family and friends
Professional
- Direct emails from the team/colleagues
- Company-wide emails
- App notifications from team project management software and the like
- Calendar invites/updates
3. Prepare suggestions for the client regarding potential folders for categorizing inbox items.
Suggested folders:
- Urgent ‣ needs review & action within the day
- Action ‣ needs action but not urgent
- FYI ‣ no action but important to read
- EA to Action ‣ needs action, but EA can handle it
Please take note that folders are different from labels. With labels, you do an in-depth email categorization. You will also need to discuss with your client the different labels you will use.
4. Go through the following with the client:
- Inbox triage
- Inbox labeling
- Drafting emails
💻 Inbox Triage
- Our clients have extremely busy lives, and email is often their major mode of communication. However, an email inbox can be both beneficial and detrimental. While it allows users to stay in touch from anywhere in the world, an overloaded inbox can create stress for many clients. A chaotic inbox can be a major obstacle to focus and progress.
- Triaging is a strategy that can give the best support to our clients. “Triage” is a term to indicate levels of urgency for treating patients. A similar approach can be used to handle the client’s email inbox. As inbox gatekeepers, we “treat” and guard their inbox since this can easily overflow even after just a day of ignoring it.
- For every email that comes into your client’s inbox, you need to take action. This could be archiving, deleting, filing or categorizing them. You also have to implement filters in place to remove unnecessary messages. This will streamline your client’s inbox and gets rid of the clutter.
Process for Client & EA
1. Identify at least 3 top priorities for inbox. For example:
- Sort and label the emails before the start of the client’s day
- Get to inbox zero every day
- Respond to VIP emails immediately
2. Differentiate the emails that are essential and non-essential. For example:
- Essential: Personal and professional emails
- Non-essential: Newsletters (should be unsubscribed and deleted right away)
3. Inbox labeling: Both EA and client should establish the folders/labels that will be used to organize the essential emails.
- Creating labels will depend on the type of emails your client usually gets (i.e. Travel Information, Orders, Meetings, etc). These labels can be simple and straightforward.
- Do not know how to create labels? Check this Inbox Labeling steps.
4. Check if there are emails that can be relegated to his existing tools/systems. For example:
- Task notifications ‣ Asana or ClickUp
- Events ‣ Calendar
- Articles from specific publications ‣ Pocket
5. Classify priority contacts
- Identify contacts and assign each one the following:
- Order of importance
- VIP name
- Contact category
- Action (i.e. message in WhatsApp and copy-paste message)
- Priority tag/label
6. Establish inbox sweep guidelines (e.g. Start of day: Check emails the client received the night before)
7. Set up guidelines for pre-drafting.
- Determine which email from different group of contacts are going to be pre-drafted by the EA and the client, and add necessary actions for each group.
8. Develop a style guide for both personal and professional emails. This includes the tone, introductory phrases, sign-off, and signature to be used.
Refer to Client Preferences Template for Inbox for a sample.
📩 Inbox Labeling
- Labeling emails is an essential way of filtering your client’s inbox, so that each email is given the right action.
- With Gmail, you can create a solid a filtering system. How do we do this?
1. Click + next to Labels at the lower left of your screen.
- The labels you create will depend on your discussion with your client.
- Recommendations for labels:
- Needs Attention
- Medium Priority
- Read Later
- Other labels you can create will be based on the type of emails your client usually gets (i.e. Travel Information, Orders, Meetings, etc).
2. Once you’ve completed creating the labels, the left side of the screen should look like this:
3. Once the labels have been created, it’s now time to sort the emails.
- Look through your client’s inbox and check the messages they receive.
- Categorize each email with the labels you have set up in Step 1. You need to open the email and click the label icon on the top of the screen.
- Choose the available labels in the drop-down menu, then click on Apply.
- You will then see the emails you’ve organized per label once you check each label.
4. Color-coding labels
- You can also choose to put colors on your labels. Simply go to the Label and click on the three dots on the right side of the label, select Label color, and then choose the color you want.
📝 Writing Email Responses
- Inbox Management’s end goal is to completely own your client’s email through inbox sweeps and responding to emails.
- Pre-drafting responses (or better yet, writing and sending them) for your client is a total game changer. It won’t take overnight for you to get your client’s tone or voice, but once done right and consistently, this will take off a huge chunk of plate from your client.
- How do you start?
1. Study your client’s Sent folder.
Take note of how he responds to different connections such as co-workers, clients, colleagues, friends, and family.
2. Set a meeting where you will discuss your client’s preferences.
- Here are a few questions you can ask:
- How would you describe your tone and voice for a certain group of connections?
- Any branding you want to convey to a group of connections?
- Introductory phrases, sign-offs, and signatures used for each group of connections?
- How short/long should your emails be?
- Any contacts or emails I should avoid?
- Do you want them to know that I’m writing this on your behalf? Or should it come from you?
- Any other insights?
3. Talk about the strategy or the process too.
- Will you write the draft, make it unread so that the client sees it? Or will you label pre-drafts as “Review?”
- Recommendations: a. Client reviews and edits.
- Pre-draft the message, label it as “Review,” and client checks, edits, and sends it.
- You can develop a system wherein you take note of your pre-drafted responses, then write down your client’s polished response (from the Sent folder), and compare the two.
- Once you understand how your client responds to emails and you’ve already built a solid email response for every connection, you can skip the approval process and eventually send the responses on their behalf.
- But there are also clients who simply wants you to do the pre-drafting for them.
- Our main goal here is to make it easy and simple as possible for your client to review and respond with drafted emails.
b. Client can give templates or voice dictations on how he responds to different emails. You can then write the pre-drafts.
c. You can also CC or BCC yourself on the messages so you’re aware which emails have been sent and which ones you need to prompt your client for action.
4. Make sure to also understand the context of each emails.
🗂️ Proactive Delegation
Pick up any tasks that you can do for the client before they even delegate it to you. You have to be attentive enough to be able to capture them. Examples of tasks you can capture:
- Adding events to their calendar
- Adding contracts to their CRM
- Purchasing online
- Preparing docs and filling out important forms for the client
🎂 Bonus
These hacks are features found in Google’s regular version as well as the Workspace suite.
Have you ever worried about making a mistake or accidentally sending a message when you’re still writing a draft? You can now use Google Docs to ease those worries. With Google Docs, you can actually send emails without leaving Docs. Your content is also going to stay editable and shareable within Docs.
How:
- Open a blank Google Docs file and type in “@“
- Choose ‘Email draft’ from the dropdown menu.
- Just like a regular email, write your message within the email draft template, indicate the subject line, and enter the email addresses of the recipients.
- Click the Gmail icon once the draft is ready. This will move your email draft to Gmail.
Benefits:
- Moving content from Docs to emails is more streamlined
- Produces a cleaner workflow compared to copying and pasting content across apps. With Docs, you can easily pull in headers, links, tables, formatting, and images.
Did you know that you can change the density of your Gmail inbox’s view? With this feature, you can modify how many emails you can see on your screen which will lessen your need for constant scrolling.
How:
- Click on the Gmail settings icon located in the top right corner of the Gmail interface
- Go to Density
- Choose ‘Comfortable’ or ‘Compact’ to compress the pane.
Benefits:
- Reduces the time spent going through unread messages.
- Bulk-select more number of emails to delete, archive, mark as ‘Read’ or ‘Unread’ and other actions you want to take.
You can easily classify the priority of your emails by using the priority inbox feature. The emails are automatically divided into three parts: important and unread, starred, and everything else.
How:
- Click on the Gmail settings icon located in the top right corner of the Gmail interface
- Go to Inbox type
- Choose ‘Priority Inbox.’ You may also customize it if you want.
Benefits:
- Good for those who want simple labeling.
- Lessens the time spent going through different labels and folders
Did you accidentally send an email that wasn’t done yet? Have you ever wanted to take back an email you already sent after realizing you had a lot of typos?
If it’s been less than 30 seconds, you can still recall that email!
How:
- Look for the ‘Undo’ notification on the bottom-left of your screen after you’ve hit ‘Send.’
- The default option available for this only up to 5 seconds after sending the email. But you can increase the default limit up to 30 seconds.
- Go to Settings
- In the ‘Unsend Email’ dropdown, change the ‘Send cancellation period’ to 10, 20, or 30 seconds.
Templates are time-savers so make use of them as much as possible. With Gmail, you can make your own set of email templates.
How:
- Enable templates by going to the Advanced Settings on your Gmail.
- Write an email and then click on the menu button in the compose email window.
- Click on ‘Templates’ and save the draft as a new template.
Benefits:
- Lessens time in composing an email for repetitive ones. All you have to do is edit it instead of writing from scratch!
We’ve all had those times where we don’t have an internet connection and we need to draft a time-sensitive response or read an important email.
With offline mode, you can now read, write responses to emails, label or delete messages even without an Internet connection. Changes will sync once you’re connected.
How:
- Go to Settings, click on ‘See all settings.’
- Look for the ‘Offline’ tab.
- Click on ‘Enable offline mail.’
- Save changes
Allowing another person to go through your inbox and even write on your behalf often feels like a huge jump in trust.
Here are 3 workflows that can help lower this common mental block.
- Parallel email drafting
- Draft limited types of replies only
- Async Shadowing
Let your assistants draft the emails, but don’t let them send.
Plan to still send your own response and let them see both your version and theirs.
Overtime, these two version will become more similar overtime.
We often get emails that just need some confirmation from contractors, repeated questions from customers, etc.
As you go through the preferences template and start digging into the details of your inbox, keep note of the more repeatable responses.
These will be the easiest to let go first.
Record a long Loom video of yourself triaging + labeling your email and talking out loud.
Do this over 2-3 email sessions that you handle.
Send these to your EA and have them record themselves doing the same task and also thinking out loud.
This will help put a spotlight on any misalignments and give you a chance to coach them through.
You can do the same process for email drafting or any other delegated task.
super-embed:<iframe src="https://embeds.beehiiv.com/c31046ef-1f6f-4bf9-b8fe-82738a6d4c77" data-test-id="beehiiv-embed" width="100%" height="320" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="border-radius: 4px; border: 2px solid #e5e7eb; margin: 0; background-color: transparent;"></iframe>