Why this skill exists
“Summarize my inbox” is the most-demoed and least-useful Copilot prompt in existence. A summary of 60 emails is a 60-line list — you’ve traded reading email for reading about email. The actual job of triage is different: find the handful of messages where your absence costs something, and make the rest disappear with a clear conscience.
This skill encodes triage-by-exception. Three tests, and only three: does it need a decision from me, does it have a deadline, is it from my management chain. Pass one test and you get surfaced with context, a recommended action, and a ready-to-edit draft reply. Fail all three and you get one sentence in a digest paragraph.
The rule we’d tattoo on the skill if we could: a deadline never gets summarized away. Summarizers love to compress the dull-looking email that happens to contain “by Thursday.” This skill is structurally incapable of doing that — deadline detection runs before any digesting happens.
What it does, step by step
- Scopes to unread plus everything since your last triage run, and reads full bodies — subject lines lie.
- Sorts by exception — decision-needed, deadline, or management-chain mail gets surfaced; newsletters, FYIs, CC-noise, and self-resolved threads get digested.
- Presents the surfaced few in deadline order: 25-word context line, the deadline quoted from the source, a recommended action with a spine (“Decline this; it conflicts with your 1:1”), and a draft reply with [CHECK] markers on anything assumed.
- Digests the rest in one paragraph, max six sentences, grouped by theme.
- Proposes archiving the digest pile as a list you approve item-by-item. Proposes. Never executes on its own.
Install (60 seconds)
- Download the SKILL.md above.
- In OneDrive, create the folder
/Documents/Cowork/skills/inbox-triage/. - Drop SKILL.md inside — Cowork auto-discovers it and shows “Inbox Triage” as a chip in the side panel.
- Say: “Triage my inbox.”
Then make it ambient: tell Cowork “Every weekday at 8 AM, triage my inbox.” Scheduled prompts cap at five, and this one earns its slot.
Make it yours (5 minutes, recommended)
- The exception tests — add your own: specific customers, a project codename, anyone in your skip-level’s org. The three defaults are a floor, not a ceiling.
- The voice of draft replies — paste two of your real sent emails into the skill as voice samples. Drafts get noticeably less generic.
- The digest threshold — if six sentences feels too tight for your volume, raise it. If you’re tempted to raise it past ten, your real problem is subscriptions, not triage.
Failure modes we’ve already handled
| What goes wrong | How the skill handles it |
|---|---|
| The boring email with the Thursday deadline gets digested | Hard rule: deadlines are never digested; ambiguous dates get surfaced |
| It archives something you’d have wanted | Cleanup is propose-only, approved item by item |
| Draft replies commit you to meetings you can’t make | Anti-fabrication rule: assumptions are marked [CHECK], never asserted |
| It quietly marks everything read | Forbidden outright — your unread state is yours |
| Huge backlog gets silently skimmed | It must declare partial coverage and triage newest-first |
The bigger idea
Triage is a policy question wearing a productivity costume: what is allowed to claim my attention? Most people never write that policy down, so their inbox writes it for them. This skill forces the policy into 600 words of plain text — and once it’s text, you can argue with it, tighten it, and hand it to software to enforce every morning. See the skill-authoring guide for how to write policies Cowork actually follows.