Business coaching · Coaching & advisory
How a coach got a triage system he never had to build
Impact
Zero setupRules, filters or lists to configureTriage on arrivalMail sorted before he opens it
Who has the ballFollow-through, visible on the screen
“When I look at my email, I know what I need to do at a glance. And the best part is, I don't have to set anything up — all I did was log into my email, and it already came with a triage system in place.”
Chris Keody · Business Coach & Advisor
- Work
- Coaching and advisory
- Mailboxes
- Several Gmail accounts
- What email is for
- Sharing ideas and scheduling time
- Interviewed
- August 2026
Not volume. Who has the ball.
Chris does not have an inbox-size problem. He has a handover problem, and he names it precisely.
“The thing that is the most painful would definitely be dropped follow-up, or the other side of that, unclear follow-through. You get an email and it's like — okay, who's got the ball?”
He was already building this by hand, for a client
Chris works directly with small business owners, and one of them had the problem in its purest form: two days off a week, and 120 emails waiting on Wednesday morning.
“One of the things I suggested when we started working with her almost six months ago was, let’s put an email triage process together. This automates that.”
His read on those 120: perhaps half genuinely need her, and the rest are noise she still has to open to find out. That is the same judgment Clarity is making, made by a coach with a whiteboard, six months earlier and by hand.
Why it had to be a real Gmail connection
Chris does not evaluate email tools casually. He can tell you which clients hold a direct Gmail API connection and which route your mail through a third party, and what breaks when they do: labels, send-later, the things that are supposed to be native.
That history is why the setup mattered as much as the sorting. He had tried the alternatives and each one asked him to rebuild his working habits inside somebody else’s window.
What he got instead needed nothing rebuilt: “I don’t have to go add people’s email addresses to respond. I don’t have to add the marketing emails to the marketing label.” The lists that make a triage system work are the lists nobody maintains, which is why hand-built ones decay.
Three clients, none of them built for Gmail
He had already worked the problem. Mimestream, Thunderbird, Apple Mail. He can tell you which ones hold a real Gmail API connection and which parse your mail through a third party, and why labels and send-later break when they do not.
None of it fixed the handover. A better window onto the same mail still leaves you deciding who owes what.
Sort the inbox on arrival, with nothing to set up
The part he keeps returning to is that there was no setup. No rules, no filters, no adding addresses to lists.
“The triage system is probably pretty close to what I would have built myself. But now I don't have to go in and filter it, I don't have to go add people's email addresses to respond.”
On the drafts: “I don't have to think about it from scratch, so I can just be like — okay, let me just delete option two.” And on the scheduling link Clarity includes without being asked: “even though I have it in my signature, I like to include it, because sometimes people don't look in the signature, or depending on their email program, it gets cut off.”