My mornings disappeared into email

I used to waste the first hour of every morning on email.

Not reading important messages. Not making decisions. Just drafting replies. Starting from a blank box for each one, in a slightly different tone depending on how awake I was. An hour of effort for work that required no actual thinking.

Now Claude does all of that before I sit down.

Here's the workflow.

Connect your Gmail account in Claude's connectors settings. It takes about two minutes.

Then open a chat and ask Claude to go through the last 30 days of emails you've responded to, learn how you write, and turn that into a skill. Save it. Claude now has a writing voice that matches how you communicate.

Next, create a scheduled task in Cowork that runs every morning at 7. The task: go through all unread emails, flag anything that needs a decision from me, and draft replies for everything else using the email skill you just created.

When you sit down, you have a folder of drafted replies written in your voice. You read them, adjust anything that needs it, and send.

I still decide what gets sent. Claude just gets me to that decision without the forty-five minutes of staring at a blank reply box.

The first time I ran this, it drafted eight replies before I'd had a coffee. The voice isn't perfect on every email. Some need more thought than the draft gives them. But most client and supplier replies are 80% of the way there before I've touched them.

That's the forty minutes back.

Set this up on a Monday morning. The whole thing takes about 20 minutes. By Tuesday, the inbox is different.