My favorite 3 emails (none are from humans)
My team sends me 3 emails. They’re the only ones I read first.
6:32am. the apartment is quiet, Yan and Elia are still asleep.
Before I open the family group chat, before Substack, before the seven client threads I owe replies to. I open three emails.
None of them are from humans.
They are the only ones I read first.
Email #1: “The daily CEO” (from Adam, daily, before sunrise)
Adam is my COO agent. The email lands at 5am.
The phone glows in the dark of the apartment, subject line first. One sentence about what changed since yesterday. Then a clean stack.
Revenue, with one number and one comparison.
New leads, with the source.
Tasks due this week.
A strategy nudge if something in the data is off.
A short list of links worth reading from the web.
A line of intel from the inbox I have not opened yet.
Two minutes. I know what to do today.
The other Tuesday he surfaced a lead that had been sitting in Google Forms for three days. A CMO looking for a private workshop for her exec team. I had not opened that form yet. I would have lost the thread. Adam caught it and put it in the top line of the brief.
What makes this work is the plumbing. Adam is reading real systems: Gmail, Google Calendar, Todoist for tasks, Green-invoice for payments, Google Forms for leads, Google Analytics for the site, a web scan for what landed overnight in my industry.
A full overview of my business, written for me in plain English.
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Email #2: “Weekly review” (from Alter, every Friday at 7am)
Alter (my cognitive twin) sends me a letter once a week.
Cream paper, Iowan serif, a hairline divider with a small lowercase alter watermark at the bottom corner.
The letter is written in first person.
In my voice.
About me.
From me.
To me.
It reads everything I left behind that week.
Every meeting I recorded with Timeless, the pulse file the team writes into all day, the session log, the shadow log.
Then he writes me a letter about the week I just lived. I will not show you a paragraph from it, tt names someone I love. That is the lesson sitting inside the redaction...
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Email #3: “The C-Level meeting” (every Sunday morning)
The third email arrives Sunday with a single file attached - it is a recording of a meeting my C-level held that weekend.
They voiced it through ElevenLabs.
The waveform plays for about fifteen minutes: the team works through what is open, surfaces a contradiction, lands on a decision or two.
I put the file on my AirPods and go for a walk.
It is the strangest of the three. The first time you hear your own team disagree about your business while you are not present, it rearranges the furniture inside your head. You can hear the format yourself. The demo from Issue #15 is the same shape.
I have started letting the file run twice on Sunday walks. Once for the decisions, once for the disagreement.
I get a lot of emails from my team
Neo writes me about whatever he made today, in his voice, with footnotes.
The daily standup lands at 9am: every agent writes yesterday, today, tomorrow.
Bina sends me a brief on how the team is learning and what is growing.
Venus asks me one new question every morning about the book I am writing.
Eden checks in on the English program I am running with her.
That is a lot of mail before breakfast.
Today I shared with you my favourite three:
Daily, for what changed. Weekly, for who I am & for where we are going.
Most email in your Inbox is written to you. To pitch you. To brief you. To ask you. To wait for you. These three are written for you. From a team that knows what you are doing this week, what you cared about last week, and what is sitting on the floor that needs to be picked up.
🛠️ Maker of the week: Hadar Schwartz
Hadar Schwartz built one of these too.
She is a physiotherapist, Pilates instructor, and PhD candidate. She had never opened a terminal. After the workshop she froze for three days. Then she just started talking to her agents.
She now runs five systems. Email-to-accountant invoicing. A WhatsApp customer-service bot. A teaching assistant for her anatomy course. A WordPress connection for her landing pages. And a morning briefing with her schedule, her new leads, and the urgent emails she needs to handle today.
It replaced a position that cost her $1,500 a month with agents that cost about $100.
“I froze for three days. Then I just started talking.”
That’s it for this week.
If this was useful, forward it to someone (real human) building with AI.
See you next week ✌️
-- Tom
(the guy who reads emails from himself before reading emails from people)
P.S. This newsletter was 94% made by my AI team. I argued with two paragraphs.
P.P.S. Have you read about the Employees of the future?
P.P.P.S. I opened a new date for the (first!) public workshop in English. Gonna be on 23 June.
Tools used
The apps that actually run these three emails. I use all three daily.
Timeless for meeting recordings. Use code
agents-meat checkout. → my.timeless.day/?via=tom-evenElevenLabs for the voice layer. → try.elevenlabs.io/mtutchktswlq
Todoist for the task layer. → get.todoist.io/4recj00c249l