How I build proactive agents

I have an agent that owns my inbox. It has two jobs. My inbox gets to zero every day, and nobody who wrote to me gets forgotten.

It never sends an email. Every reply it writes is a draft, and I review, edit and press send. It never deletes anything either. Every email gets a label, so I can still search for it.

It used to be reactive. It would tell me about an email and then do nothing about it. If I didn't answer, it was forgotten. So I gave it a few rules, and now it follows things through. These are the rules.

If a person wrote to me and I haven't replied, it matters. The only emails it can ignore are the ones a machine sent, like newsletters. If you let the agent decide what's important, anything it doesn't recognise goes in a pile marked "unsure". Then you have to go through that pile yourself, which is the job you gave it.

It looks at the older mail. I answer the last two days of email myself, from my phone, at any hour. An agent watching those two days only tells me things I've already done. So mine looks at mail between three days and six weeks old, because that's where replies get forgotten. One person once waited 37 days for an answer.

It checks before it tells me anything. Before the agent says someone is waiting, it checks my sent mail and my calendar. It looks at the person and at what they asked. If I answered someone in a different email, they're not waiting. But if I wrote to them about something else, the question they asked is still open.

It reads what I've promised people. It goes through my sent mail looking for things I said I would do. The person I promised usually doesn't write again, so that promise isn't written down anywhere. The first time it did this, it read two weeks of mail and found six. Three were already done, so it only gave me the other three.

It doesn't tell me anything just once. Anything that needs me goes on a list and stays there until I answer, or until my sent mail or calendar shows it's done. It reminds me of whatever is still on the list three times a day, at 08:30, 12:30 and 17:00. This is the rule that made it proactive, because before it, anything I didn't answer straight away was forgotten.

It sends me something I can reply to. An email from an agent is no use if I can't answer it. So it sends a message to my phone, I reply, and then it goes and does what I asked.

It writes down my answers. When I tell it how to handle something, it notes the answer, and for how long it applies, so it never asks me the same question twice.

This morning is a good example. Thirteen emails came in overnight. Four were from people and nine were newsletters. Two of the four asked me something, so it wrote replies to those for me to check. It didn't message me, because none of it was urgent.

At 08:30 there were five things on its list. Before reminding me, it checked them. I had already done two. I'd sent one of its replies at 08:12 and accepted a meeting invite. So it took those off the list and didn't mention them. It sent me one message with the other three, each one short enough to deal with in a line.

One of the three was a folder a client had shared with me the day before. I replied that I couldn't find the email. So it went and got it. It sent me a link to the email, a link to the folder, and which account to open it with, and it put the email back at the top of my inbox.

Every one of these rules started as something I said to the agent when it got something wrong. Each one went into its instructions the same day.