| name | triage-inbox |
| description | Sort every message in an inbox sweep into exactly one of three buckets — needs a person, needs a draftable reply, or noise — and label accordingly. Reads and labels only; sends nothing. Use as the opening step of the inbox triage workflow. |
Triaging the inbox
One pass, every message, exactly one bucket each. The judgement lives here; the writing
happens in the next step.
1. The three buckets
| Bucket | What lands in it |
|---|
| Needs a person | A decision, money, a relationship, anything time-bound, anything where being wrong is expensive |
| Needs a reply you can draft | A question whose answer is in shared/business-brain.md or the FAQ |
| Noise | Newsletters, receipts, notifications, automated mail |
Every message goes in exactly one. A message you cannot place goes in needs a person
— uncertainty rounds up, not down.
2. How to work the sweep
- Read
shared/about-me.md for who this person is and how they like their inbox
handled, and shared/business-brain.md for which senders and subjects matter.
- List the unread and recent threads in the window you were given.
- Bucket each one. Apply the rule to every message in the sweep, not only the first
screen of them.
- Handle the noise the way
shared/about-me.md says to — archive or label. When it
says nothing, label rather than archive: a label is reversible by looking, an
archive is reversible by remembering.
- Leave needs a person threads untouched, at the top of the list you hand off.
If the shared files still contain <!-- fill: ... --> markers, be conservative: flag
more, archive less, and say what was missing.
3. What leaves this step
A bucketed list — one line per message: sender, what it is, which bucket, and for the
draftable ones, where the answer lives. The drafting step works only from this list.
4. The boundary
This step reads, labels, and files. It does not send, forward, reply, delete
permanently, or unsubscribe — and neither does any step after it. A message that seems
to demand an immediate answer goes to the top of needs a person; that is what
urgency gets.
