AI for Non-Techies 🛠️: Top Tools for Email and Inbox Management

✨ How to save time on this routine task that eats up hours in our week.

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

Hey Everyone,

While I’m on a semi summer break, I’m looking more into applied AI tools to help us be more effective and productive at work.

We continue our series:

• Part I: How to use Perplexity in your daily workflow 👀

• Part II: AI for Non-Techies 🛠️: Top Tools for Meeting Notes

• Part III: Applied AI School ✍🏻: Tools for Email Writing 📧

When it comes to the capabilities of LLMs to actually intersect with our work and the professional sphere, code and writing remain the most obvious. While frontier models are great, more specialized AI tools for particular use cases work the best.

Email is a Huge Time Sink

Most people, particularly those in professional settings, receive a significant number of emails each day. On average, an individual receives around 121 emails per day. On a collective level: that amounts to an astounding 300.4 billion emails sent and received globally each day as of 2024. So clearly AI tools that help us with our inbox, and of course Google is rolling out a new Gemini AI side panel in Gmail that can help you write emails and summarize email threads.

A lot of routine Email can be automated and AI tool assistants can be used to save us time. Augmenting how you use Email with AI, is a natural fit for a human-AI hybrid workforce. If Generative AI is going to help us reduce repetitive work, Email has to be a fairly provactive use case.

How Much Time for Most People?

• In terms of time spent on emails, the average office worker dedicates approximately 15.5 hours per week to managing their inbox, which equates to about 16% of their workweek.

• That amounts to 62 hours a month, which is the equivalent to a part time job.

Let’s think about some of the better tools to help with Email, and Email writing in particular. This won’t be an exhaustive list but more like a starter.

After some years the BYOAI toolkit isn’t just about productivity, but lightening cognitive load, giving us more time for higher-level tasks and solving well-being at work by reducing annoying tasks and energy draining high-friction tasks.

While I know it’s ironic, this is a Newsletter, let’s not assume Email isn’t annoying. 😂 It’s just the sort of thing you’d expect AI to be able to help with. And finally in 2024, it’s getting better at this.

AI Tools and AI assistants, meet your Email inbox. I dive into some of the best Email AI assistants, inbox management and Email strategies to save you the most time and lift your productivity.