CatalogueRuns without you20 of 36
The reply that is written before you open it
Messages that arrive are read and understood, the reply is drafted, and a person decides whether it goes.
What arrives
- A draft reply
- waiting, for what arrives while you are elsewhere
- Read and understood
- so the draft answers what was actually asked
- Follow-ups and reminders
- on a schedule, with nobody starting them
- Reports
- put together and sent on the day they are due
- Documents
- generated, filled in and filed under the right customer
- A person sends
- unless you and I agree otherwise in writing
The hour you get back#
Most of a working inbox is not hard, it is just constant. The same six questions, the same three attachments, the same polite paragraph you have written four hundred times and will write again this afternoon.
What arrives is read properly - the actual question, not a keyword - and the reply is written and left waiting for you. Opening the inbox becomes reading and approving rather than composing from nothing.
It prepares. It does not decide#
A person sends. That is the default and it stays the default unless you and I agree otherwise in writing, on a page you can read afterwards.
The reason is not caution for its own sake. Something that drafts well is not the same as something that should be trusted to judge an unhappy customer, a legal question, or a price. It prepares the ordinary so you have time for the rest.
What heavy use costs, said before it starts#
Reading and drafting at ordinary volume for a small business costs nothing you will notice. Sustained heavy use has a real running cost, per message, and it goes to your own account rather than through me.
So you get the figure before it starts, not after. If a use you are considering would move it, I will say so, and we will decide together whether that use is worth it.