 Your client wakes up a 7AM to find that you've already cleared his inbox of calendar

notifications and promotional emails.

 He reads through his daily news summaries (which were left marked unread and decides
he no longer wants to receive emails from The Hustle, so he labels the email
unsubscribe for you to ensure unsubscribing is successful.
 He reviews the three time-sensitive emails marked urgent and provides instructions to
you on what to do next via voice memo.
 Mid-morning your client receives two emails which you pre-draft responses to. You
reference previous emails to these contacts to ensure you match tone and typical
greetings and closings.
 At 1PM your client reviews the two pre-drafted emails knowing that you always
complete a second daily sweep by noon in his timezone. He sends one as is and slightly
modifies the second, bcc-ing you so you can note the changes.

 <aside> ⏳ ou have 1 hour to complete Step 1 // Learning by Reading. Ensure you give
yourself enough time to complete this step all at once.
 </aside>
 Your training begins now! At the end of each reading chapter, you will find a short quiz
to test your knowledge of the material. Once you achieve 100% on the quiz, it's time to
move on to the next section. (Don't worry you can take the quizzes as many times as
needed!)

Regular Cadence for Inbox Management

The quickest way to build trust with your client's inbox is setting up a regular cadence for inbox
clearing and pre-drafting (we'll call the combination of these two routines an "inbox sweep").

While each client's preferences will be slightly different, start by suggesting a twice-a-day
routine (the client's morning and mid-afternoon).

 Matthew's EA Jon knows he typically begins his work day at 7am, so his EA Jon ensures
he completes clearing his inbox and pre-drafting emails before 7am each morning
 Jon also knows that Matthew aims to address all new, non-urgent correspondence each
day at 3pm, so he completes another inbox sweep by this time
Silent Updates
With email acting as a hub for everyday life, updates and transactional emails can often clutter
up the inbox. With the superpower of a great EA like yourself, your client can rest assured that
they won't miss anything important, so they have no need to check or see these types of
messages.

In your 1:1 with your client review each of the following categories of emails:

1. Calendar event updates (e.g. someone accepted a meeting invite)

1. Are there any companies or contacts that it is important for the client to see updates
from?
2. Can the rest be disabled or archived?

2. Purchase confirmation (e.g. thanks for your order from Miir!)

1. Can these simply be archived after an order is placed?

3. Shipping confirmation (e.g. your package from apple shipped via UPS)
1. Does the client have a preferred way to know of expected packages? (e.g. summary in
daily update email, spreadsheet, notification from you on day of delivery)

4. Known security checks (e.g. someone accessed your account from the Philippines. was it
you?)
1. Can these simply be archived when associated with you?

Flawless Unsubscribe
Unsubscribing from emails can be complicated and auto-unsubscribe features (like the one found
in Superhuman) don't always work. Notifications often require logging into an account to
disable.

1. Instruct your client to label unwanted emails as unsubscribe and then archive them instead of
unsubscribing
2. Each day during your daily inbox sweep, view all emails labeled unsubscribe and follow the
unsubscribe process (usually via a link in the footer of the email)
3. If an email appears impossible to unsubscribe from (e.g. spam that makes it past an email filter)
add the email address to your client's blocked senders list
<aside> 🎤 Voice Delegation Opportunity! Remember, voice delegation is always faster than
written instructions, so make sure to encourage your client to leverage dictation for pre-drafted
emails through voice messages!

</aside>

<aside> 💡 Always BCC Yourself! Bcc-ing yourself on pre-drafted emails ensures that you will
get a copy when your client sends the message. This allows you to see what changes were made
and better calibrate your writing style to match your client.

</aside>

Why Pre-draft?
More time thinking, less time writing

Leveraging voice dictation to dictate pre-drafted emails allows clients to focus on moving
projects forward without needing to be in front of a keyboard.

The "reply hurdle"

Most clients struggle to reply to emails quickly—needing too much brain space to read and
formulate a reply. Pre-drafted emails help clients get over this hurdle. Even making corrections
to a pre-drafted reply is easier than writing from scratch!

Better over time

The longer you practice pre-drafting emails with your client, the closer to "ready to send" they
will be—saving your client more and more time as you continue to work together!

At first, your client will re-write a lot of your drafts; however after about a month of practicing
this together, you should notice that your client's edits are becoming smaller and less frequent.

Pre-drafting from Dictation

As you build trust with your client, you can encourage them to use voice notes to delegate pre-
drafting emails. This may be something that doesn't come intuitively to them at first, but as you
gain success in proactively pre-drafting it will become more natural.
Sounding Like Your Client

Access to your client's inbox is an amazing resource for learning to match their writing style.
Invest time reading through past emails and observe the following patterns as a beginning guide
to matching tone.

1. Create a table like the example below with at least four lists of contact types family, close
friends, internal business contacts, external business contacts
2. Find at least 10 examples of emails for each category and add any openings, closings, or
common expressions that are used 3 or more times.

Writing Style Table Examples

Recurring Procedure for Pre-drafting

If your client has emailed the recipient previously...

1. ...then mirror how the client typically opens and closes the email (compare up to three recent
emails if available).
2. Make special note of any other common expressions or formatting your client may use with this
recipient

If your client has not emailed this recipient previously...

1. ...then determine which contact type the recipient falls into from the writing style table you
created, and default to this opening, closing, and common expression style style.

Proactive Pre-drafting
Seeing proactively pre-drafted email responses in their inbox will feel like magic to your client.
We've broken down some suggestions for emails to pre-draft, by phase, to help you gain
confidence, skill, and trust with your client.

Phase 1 - Easy Wins

There are lots of tiny, frequent emails that your client will receive and need to respond to. You
can quickly achieve pre-draft success by identifying and executing on these opportunities
immediately after launching this playbook.

 Scheduling confirmations and coordination

 Post-meeting thank you's
 Customer service replies
Phase 2 - Short Replies

If you have mastered basic openers, closers, and common expressions, and your client is now
allowing you to send easy wins without approval, you're now ready for the next phase of
proactive pre-drafting. Now, you'll begin to pre-draft for short, mostly factual, emails where the
focus is primarily on communicating basic information. For these emails, matching tone is less
important.

Some examples of these might include:

 Follow-up emails where your client is waiting on requested information or confirmation

<aside> 💡 Set Follow Up Reminders For maximum client delight, take full ownership of getting
a response by setting your own reminders and continuing to follow up until the matter is
resolved.

</aside>

 Confirmation of basic details where you know the answer or can find it easily
 Short interactions with direct reports or other low-stakes contacts

Phase 3 - Advanced Pre-drafting

If your client is now allowing you to simply send short replies on their behalf, it's time to move
on to some more challenging examples!

Some examples might include:

 Personal emails between friends and family, where matching tone is more challenging
 Business emails where complex details need to be conveyed accurately

Quiz
1.2 Pre-drafting // Quiz

Next // 1.2 Pre-drafting // Quiz

Athena Playbook Menus

After meeting with your client, you'll launch this playbook by sharing the client facing menu
with your client and reviewing it together during your regularly scheduled 1:1.
The menu shares the ultimate goal of each item and briefly describes how you will achieve
maximum leverage potential together.

Modifications and Preferences

As you have learned, some of the menu items will require you to learn your client's preferences
(e.g. media curation preferences). They may also wish to modify the process in some way (e.g.
three daily inbox sweeps instead of two).