Taming your inbox with AI

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Inbox Zero. The concept of having an empty inbox is a goal many of us find elusive, but it is also something that AI can help with now. I subscribe to a lot of email newsletters—mostly tech and AI ones. Subscribing always seems like a good idea at the time, but as they pour into my inbox every day, it gets harder and harder to find the time to read them.

The other night I thought about unsubscribing from a bunch of them, but occasionally each one has content I am actually interested in. I figured this was a perfect opportunity to experiment with Google’s new AI agent, Spark.

An AI agent is a command that runs in AI automatically, the in the background all of the time. Although with this one, I told it to run only three times a day.

Here is the workflow I set up to handle them:

1. Gmail Filter and Labeling: I went into my Gmail advanced settings and created a filter containing the sender addresses for all my newsletters. I set up a rule so that whenever a new one arrives, it bypasses the inbox and gets labeled “newsletters”.

2. Spark Automation: If you give Spark access to your email, Google Drive, and other tools, it can do some amazing things. I instructed Spark to check my Gmail three times a day—at 6 a.m., noon, and 6 p.m.—for any unread emails carrying the “newsletters” label.

3. Summarization and Archiving: For each unread newsletter, Spark compiles a detailed summary, writes it into a Google Doc, and marks the original email as read.

Now, instead of sorting through a cluttered inbox, I just open that single Google Doc a few times a day. It gives me a quick overview of what was in each newsletter, and it includes a direct link so I can easily open and read the full email if something catches my eye. Unfortunately, Spark is not available to the free users of Gemini, but is available with the $20-a-month Pro subscription. Here is an article I found that explains Spark in more detail and how to use it. https://www.datacamp.com/blog/gemini-spark?hl=en-US

I am hearing from more and more people in all walks of life how a $20-a-month AI subscription is of value. Google’s Gemini is just one. There is also ChatGPT, Claude from Anthropic, and others.

round our home recently, we have discussed all sorts of things in conversation with AI:

  • Home improvements

  • Strategies for different tasks

  • Technical PC issues

  • Car repair issues

  • Help with purchase decisions

AI has the ability, when you ask it a question, to reach out and find not just the best source of information for a problem, but to compile information from a variety of sources into a cohesive explanation to answer your question. Certainly, you have to guard against hallucinations and falsehoods, so I would not rely on it for medical issues. But for other issues, it works pretty well, as long as you remain somewhat skeptical and confirm anything that is critical. If you ask it, it can even tell you where it found a particular piece of information. 

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