April 1, 2026
Hi Everyone,
McKinsey estimates that 28% of the average knowledge worker's week goes to email. Microsoft's 2025 data puts the number at 117 emails per day, with 85% read in under 15 seconds.
Put differently, you're losing nearly 1.5 days every week to messages you mostly skim and forget.
The single most useful move is deciding - once - which emails actually need you, and building a system so the rest never reach you at all.
Today, we're walking you through how to sort your inbox into keep, delegate, eliminate, and automate, with escalation rules so nothing critical gets buried.
Start with the Six T's test
Jenny Blake, writing in Harvard Business Review, offers a filter that works well for email.
Flag any message that is:
Tiny - a two-minute reply that piles up across dozens of threads
Tedious - scheduling, confirmations, routine approvals
Time-consuming - where the first 80% of the work can be done by someone else
Teachable - something you can explain once and hand off
Time-sensitive - urgent but not requiring your judgment
Terrible at - outside your strengths
If an email hits two or more of those, it shouldn't be sitting in your inbox.
Pull up your last 50 emails and run them through this test. You'll probably find quite a few of them qualify.
Sort everything into four groups
Once you've tagged your emails, each one belongs in one of four groups.
Eliminate: Newsletters you never read, CC threads where you're not needed, internal notifications you can get from a dashboard. Unsubscribe or set a filter to archive automatically. This alone can cut 15-20% of your daily volume.
Automate: Scheduling requests, meeting confirmations, recurring status updates, and standard replies you send more than twice a week. Set up templates, canned responses, or auto-rules in your email client. If you use a tool like Superhuman or SaneBox, it can learn your sorting behavior and start doing this for you within a few days.
Delegate to a person: Routine replies that need a human touch but not your specific judgment, research requests, travel coordination, vendor follow-ups, and anything that passes the Six T's test but can't be automated. A properly trained executive assistant (EA) can eventually handle 60 to 70% of an executive's inbox independently, according to benchmarks from multiple EA firms.
Keep: Messages that require your authority, your relationships, or a judgment call on something genuinely complex. A sensitive conversation with a board member, a hiring decision that needs your input, a client escalation where your relationship is the deciding factor. This should be a small fraction of your total volume.
Set escalation triggers before you delegate anything
Before anyone else touches your inbox, agree on a short escalation list:
- Any message from board members, key investors, top clients, or your direct reports gets forwarded to you immediately
- Anything involving legal risk, financial commitments above a set threshold, or HR issues gets flagged
- Emotionally charged or sensitive conversations always come to you directly
Everything else your EA can triage, batch, and summarize in a single daily briefing – one message at the end of the day covering what was handled, what's pending, and what needs your input.
Match authority to the task
Michael Hyatt's Five Levels of Delegation, from his book Free to Focus, give you a shared language for how much freedom to grant. For email, it works like this.
A new assistant starts at Level 2 – they read, sort, and flag, but you make the decisions. Within a few weeks, move routine categories to Level 4, where they reply and inform you afterward.
Over time, the categories that are truly routine move to Level 5, where they handle them without reporting back at all.
Be explicit about which level applies to which type of email. When that's unclear, people either hold back and ask permission on everything, or they overstep and make a call you didn't authorize. Both erode the relationship fast.
Go deeper
👉 First Round Review: A Tactical Guide to Working with EAs – Sam Corcos's full breakdown of how he delegates 400 tasks a month, including detailed inbox triage methods
👉 Cal Newport: A World Without Email – the case for batching communication into fixed blocks and reducing real-time inbox dependence
👉 McKinsey: The Social Economy – the research behind the 28% number, with data on where knowledge workers actually spend their hours and what cuts through
👉 Microsoft WorkLab: Breaking Down the Infinite Workday – 117 emails, 153 Teams messages, and 275 interruptions a day. Worth scanning to see how your own week compares
Coming up tomorrow
Tomorrow we're sharing a four-section pre-read structure that moves updates off your board discussion agenda entirely.
Have a good one!
P.S. What percentage of your inbox actually needs you? If you ran the 50-email test, we'd love to hear your number – let us know.