Inbox to thirty minutes a day.
The triage rules, the draft prompts, and what we stopped automating.
This is the inbox routine for one person. Three triage sweeps a day, three buckets, one weekly review.
What you'll have when you finish: Superhuman configured with send-later as the default and three-bucket triage rules, a Claude project pre-loaded with your reply voice file and the long-reply draft prompt, and an auto-archive regex list for the 8 most common automated senders.
Accounts you'll need: superhuman.com (paid, $30/mo) · claude.ai (Pro for projects) · zapier.com/mcp for the routing webhooks. Customer.io and Smartlead are optional and only needed for outbound.
The stack — five tools, ranked.
- 01Superhuman + AI — triage & keyboard ergonomicsdaily
- 02Claude — draft + tonedaily
- 03Customer.io — outbound sequencesweekly
- 04Smartlead — cold outboundmonthly
- 05Zapier MCP server — route specific sendersweekly
Superhuman is keystrokes. Claude is the long replies you don't want to write. The rest are how the system feeds itself.
How to apply it.
-
019am · 10 min
Morning sweep — fastest pass.
Top to bottom. Three buckets only. No fourth bucket. If you can't decide in five seconds, snooze.
01 · ReplyTwo-minute reply.
Written and sent right then. Quick acknowledgments, short answers, calendar confirmations.
02 · SnoozeSnooze with a date.
Anything that needs more than two minutes. Claude drafts the long ones at 2 pm.
03 · ArchiveArchive on sight.
FYIs, automated notifications, anything you'd never reply to. Search beats filing.
Two-minute replies get written and sent right then. Anything longer than that goes to the snooze list with a date attached — Claude will draft it later.
-
022pm · 10 min
Midday — Claude drafts the longs.
Open the snoozed list. Pick the three longest. Paste each into Claude with the voice file and the context. "Draft a reply that says X, no more than 8 sentences, in my voice."
Edit each draft — at least one sentence per email, by hand. Never send a Claude reply unedited. The unedited ones are the ones that get pushback.
-
035pm · 10 min
Closing sweep — finish everything in the inbox.
The inbox must be empty by 5:10. Anything that survived the morning sweep gets resolved now — reply, delegate, archive, or move to a weekly review list.
Snoozed items don't count toward "empty." They're scheduled. The visible inbox is what gets cleared.
-
04weekly · 15 min
Weekly review — The snoozed list.
End of the week, go through everything snoozed. Half are now obsolete — archive. Quarter are quick — reply now. Quarter are real — leave snoozed.
The weekly review is what stops the snooze list from becoming a graveyard. Without it, you'll have 80 items snoozed in three months and start dreading the inbox again.
What we stopped doing.
- ×Reading email on the phone. Triage on the phone means re-reading on the laptop. Two passes, same email.
- ×Using the inbox as a todo list. If it's a task, it goes to the task tool. The email gets archived.
- ×Folders beyond Inbox / Snoozed / Archive. Search is faster than filing.
- ×VIP filters. Everyone's important to someone. None are urgent at 11pm.
- ×Quick checks before bed. Either it can wait, or it can wake you up — never both.
- ×Sending Claude drafts unedited. The unedited ones tip readers off and you lose trust on the rest.
- ×Replying to "thanks" emails. Archive. The thread is done.
The take.
The inbox isn't the problem. The second read is. Decide once. Two-minute, snooze, archive. Three sweeps. Claude drafts the longs at 2pm. The weekly review cleans the snooze list. Everything else is decoration.
If you steal one thing — the five-second rule. If you can't bucket the email in five seconds, you're overthinking it. Snooze and move on.
Don't add these until you've held inbox zero for two weeks. They're amplifiers, not replacements.
Auto-send for two specific reply types.
Find the two reply types you write almost identically every time — for us it's calendar requests and "no, but here's who" intros. Wire Claude to draft and send those without your review, with a 5-minute delayed send window. You can yank a bad one before it leaves.
Two reply types only. Not five. The risk scales with the count.
Snooze with context attached.
When you snooze a long reply, paste the link to the doc the answer needs into the snooze note. When the email comes back, the context comes with it. Saves the five minutes of "wait, what did we want to say?"
Auto-archive by sender pattern.
Build a small regex list of senders that are never two-minute replies — automated newsletters, GitHub notifications, vendor receipts. They go straight to archive and you read them on demand via search, not via the inbox.
Important: never apply this to actual humans. Only to robots.
Send-later as the default.
Switch Superhuman's default send to "send at 8am tomorrow." Anything you can override. The default removes the 11pm "we just remembered" email that arrives like an alarm.
Weekly sweep audit.
Once a week, glance at your sent folder for the past 7 days. Count how many emails took more than 8 sentences. If it's more than five, the long-reply pattern is creeping back — add a weekly "kill the long replies" pass.
The inbox quietly fills back up. Five symptoms that tell you the routine slipped — and the fix.
№ 01Inbox hits 50 within days.+
№ 02Replies get nasty pushback.+
№ 03Important reply never sent.+
№ 04Send-later fired at 2am.+
№ 05Same vendor emails three times this week.+
Three drop-ins. The triage prompt, the draft prompt, the sender-archive list.
The five-second triage prompt.
Reads an email, returns a single bucket. Wire it as a Superhuman snippet or a Zapier step on incoming.
You triage incoming email. Output ONE word — nothing else.
The word is the bucket.
Buckets:
reply_2min — quick reply, < 8 sentences, no research needed.
snooze — needs > 2 min, OR needs context I don't have here.
archive — informational, automated, FYI, or "thanks" reply.
Rules:
- If the sender is a robot/automation, bucket = archive.
- If the email contains "ASAP" or "urgent" from a real human
and you would write a quick reply, bucket = reply_2min.
- If you're unsure between reply_2min and snooze, choose snooze.
EMAIL
─────
{{email_body}}
FROM: {{from_email}}
SUBJ: {{subject}}
The long-reply draft prompt.
For the 2pm Claude session. Voice file in project context.
Draft a reply to this email in my voice. Voice file is in
project context.
Rules:
- Max 8 sentences.
- Lead with the answer, not the throat-clearing.
- One specific number or name per paragraph if possible.
- Use an em-dash only mid-clause, never decorative.
- End with a question or a clear next step. Never both.
THE EMAIL I'M REPLYING TO
─────────────────────────
{{their_email}}
THE GIST OF WHAT I WANT TO SAY
──────────────────────────────
{{my_one_line_intent}}
ANY CONTEXT THEY DON'T HAVE
───────────────────────────
{{optional_context_or_link}}
Output only the email body. No subject line. No signature.
The auto-archive sender list.
Regex patterns for senders that never need triage. Add to your filter rules.
AUTO-ARCHIVE — regex on sender or subject
─────────────────────────────────────────
From-address patterns:
noreply@.*
no-reply@.*
notifications@.*
receipt@.*
hello@(?:stripe|figma|notion|linear|github|vercel)\.com
digest@.*
newsletter@.*
Subject patterns:
^(?:Re: )?Your .* receipt
^Your .* invoice
^.*notification\b
^.*weekly (?:digest|summary)\b
^Order #.* confirmed
Behavior:
- Match either pattern -> auto-archive, never inbox.
- Override: include + flag if subject contains
"failed", "declined", "expires", or your name verbatim.
Need this done for you? The author works on this exact thing with audit clients at austinaiguy.com.