How to get ChatGPT to email you a daily list of actions from your inbox

I used to start every day the same way. Open the inbox, scroll, feel slightly sick, and then reply to whatever happened to be at the top. The important things were rarely at the top.

What fixed it was embarrassingly simple. Every morning at seven, ChatGPT reads the emails I have not replied to and sends me a short list. Who is waiting, what they asked for, and roughly how urgent it is. I read it with my coffee and I know what my day looks like before I open a single message.

What the daily list looks like

Mine has three sections. Waiting on me, which is anything where someone has asked a direct question or requested something. Money, which pulls out quotes, invoices and anything mentioning a payment. And Can probably ignore, so I have the reassurance that nothing has slipped through.

Each line is one sentence: the person, the request, and how many days it has been sitting there. That last detail matters more than you would think. Seeing "Sarah, asked for revised pricing, 4 days" is a very effective nudge.

The simple way, using ChatGPT tasks

If you use ChatGPT with a connected Gmail or Outlook account, you can ask it to run a scheduled task. Turn on the email connector in settings, then give it an instruction along these lines:

Every weekday at 7am, look at emails in my inbox from the last 7 days that I have not replied to. Ignore newsletters, receipts and automated notifications. List each one under Waiting on me, Money, or Can probably ignore. For each, give the sender, what they want in one sentence, and how many days old it is. Keep the whole thing short enough to read in two minutes.

Run it manually a few times first and tweak the wording. You will almost certainly need to tell it about a couple of senders it keeps getting wrong.

The sturdier way, for a team

The built in approach is brilliant for one person. It gets shaky when you want it for a whole team, when you need it to check a shared mailbox, or when your emails contain information you would rather not hand to a consumer account.

In those cases we usually build a small automation instead. A scheduled job reads the mailbox through the proper Microsoft or Google connection, sends only the relevant text to a model running under a business agreement, and emails the digest out. It can also push the actions straight into your CRM or task list so nothing relies on someone reading an email about emails.

A few things I learned the hard way

Tell it what not to include. Without that instruction, half the list will be marketing emails pretending to be personal.

Keep the output short. If the digest takes ten minutes to read, you will stop reading it within a fortnight.

Check it against reality for the first week. Glance through your inbox alongside the digest. Once you trust it, you can stop.

Do not let it reply for you yet. Drafting replies is a lovely next step, but sending them automatically is how you end up apologising to a client.

Where to go from here

If this sounds useful but you would like it set up properly for your team, with your shared mailboxes and your CRM, that is exactly the kind of small, quick project we do. Or try our free AI adviser and see what else it suggests for a business like yours.