How to triage 120 messages a day in 15 minutes

A hundred and twenty messages a day sounds like a lot until you count the sources: email, two or three chat tools, calendar invites, document comments and the occasional text that should not be about work but is. For many people in coordination roles the number is not an exaggeration. The question is not how to read all of them faster. It is how to avoid reading most of them at all.

This guide describes a three-pass routine. It works with a plain inbox and a timer, and it keeps the important things from hiding among the unimportant ones. A schedule near the end fits the whole routine into fifteen minutes, once or twice a day.

The cost of reading everything

Reading every message in the order it arrives feels diligent. In practice it has three costs. The first is time: even a quick glance at each message adds up, and the glance is rarely enough, so many messages get a second look later. The second is attention: each message asks you to switch context, and the switch costs more than the reading. The third is that urgent things are not labeled urgent. A request from your director sits between two newsletters, and your attention is already spent by the time you reach it.

The alternative is to separate three activities that usually get mixed together: sorting, deciding and writing. Each one is easier when you do it on its own. Sorting is fast and mechanical. Deciding needs a clear head but little time. Writing needs the most focus, so it deserves its own block.

Pass 1: sort without reading

In the first pass you touch every message once, and you open very few of them. You are looking at the sender and the subject line and putting each message into one of three piles.

• Needs me: a person you work with asked you something, or a deadline is attached. Leave it where you can see it.
• Can wait: useful, but nothing happens if it sits until tomorrow. Move it to a read-later folder.
• Can be filed: receipts, notifications, newsletters and calendar confirmations. File or archive them and move on.

The rule for pass 1 is that you may not reply to anything. The moment you start writing, you have left the sorting pass and your pace collapses. If a message needs more than a couple of seconds of thought, it goes in needs me.

Build filters for the filed pile. Anything that arrives from the same source every week and never needs a reply should skip your inbox entirely. A dozen filters, built over a few weeks, take a large part of the daily volume out of your way without any extra effort.

Pass 2: decide in four ways

Now open the needs me pile, one message at a time, and decide what happens next. There are only four possible outcomes, and naming them keeps you from drifting.

• Reply: a response is needed. Mark it for pass 3.
• Task: it needs work, not a reply. Create the task with a date, then archive the message.
• Waiting: someone else owes you something. Note who, and when you will check.
• Done: nothing more is needed. Archive it.

Deciding is not doing. Pass 2 is complete when every message in the pile carries one of those four marks. Many of them turn out to need no reply at all.

One habit makes this pass much faster: write the decision on the message, not in your head. A label, a flag or a one-word note is enough. Anything that lives only in your head will come back as a second read.

Pass 3: draft in one sitting

Replies are written together, in a single block, with notifications off. Batching helps because the mental setup for writing is the same for every reply: you are in the mood to be brief, clear and polite. Switching between writing and reading splits that mood.

Aim for short replies. Start with the answer, add one sentence of context and end with the next step and who owns it. If a reply wants to be longer than a paragraph, it is usually a conversation, so suggest a call instead.

Leave the replies that need real thought for the end of the block, or turn them into tasks. A reply that takes twenty minutes to write is not part of a triage routine.

Batching rules that are safe

Batching is where triage goes wrong, so a few rules are worth stating plainly. Sorting in bulk and sending in bulk are very different risks.

• Bulk-file only what you can find again. Archive instead of deleting, and use folders or labels you will actually search.
• Never bulk-reply. Even a polite 'received, thanks' to a group deserves a glance at each recipient.
• Handle clients, executives and anything involving HR, legal or pay on their own, never in the middle of a batch.
• Before you send, read the recipient line. It is the cheapest check there is.
• After you change a filter or rule, look at what it caught the next morning.

A 15-minute schedule

Here is the routine as a timed schedule. Run it once in the morning and, if volume demands it, once in the afternoon. A timer helps. When it ends, stop.

1. 1Silence the noise (1 minute). Close everything except your inbox and your main chat tool. Turn off notifications for the next quarter of an hour.
2. 2Pass 1: sort (4 minutes). Go through every new message by sender and subject. File it, defer it or mark it needs me. Reply to nothing.
3. 3Pass 2: decide (4 minutes). Open each needs me message and mark it reply, task, waiting or done. Create the tasks now, with dates.
4. 4Pass 3: draft (5 minutes). Write the short replies in one sitting. Send the ones you are sure of and leave the rest as drafts to reread.
5. 5Close the loop (1 minute). Look at your waiting list and write down tomorrow's first task.

These times are a target, not a law. If a pass runs long on a heavy day, shorten the next one by dropping the lowest-value messages, not by skipping the pass.

SecondDesk runs passes 1 and 3

SecondDesk does the mechanical parts of this routine so your fifteen minutes can go to deciding. Pass 1 happens before you sit down. The unified inbox reads your connected sources and sorts messages into Priority, Other and Auto-handled. Low-risk noise is filed automatically, every action is logged, and Undo restores anything in one click.

Pass 3 is the drafting. SecondDesk writes the replies worth sending and parks them in the Review queue, where you approve, edit or discard them with the keyboard. Nothing is sent until you approve it, and anything involving clients, executives or sensitive topics is approved one by one.

Pass 2 stays yours on purpose. Deciding what a message means for your week is the part that needs you. You can follow the routine above on a plain inbox today, and try it on sample data in SecondDesk when you want the sorting and drafting done for you.