Exec assistant — email triage, prep, action tracker

The ten minutes before every call

The shape of an exec’s morning is almost always the same. Open the inbox, scan for the threads that matter today, glance at the calendar, and start the prep for the first meeting. Read the latest email back-and-forth with the attendee. Pull up what was said and agreed last time. Draft the reply you owe. Then do it again for the next meeting.

The prep is unglamorous, fiddly, and ever-present. The pieces all live in the same two tools — your inbox and your calendar — and stitching them together against the deal they belong to is the part that quietly vanishes an hour every morning.

Deals, contacts, and the day ahead

The workspace is a CRM organised around your deals — a Pipeline page that lays out every active deal as a board, Contact and Company pages for the people and organisations behind those deals, and a Deal Detail page that pulls together everything tied to one specific opportunity. The activity timeline on each deal is where Outlook email threads and calendar events land alongside the standard call / note / meeting log.

The assistant works on top of that surface. You don’t hunt through Outlook for the right thread or click through the calendar to find the next meeting — you ask, and the assistant pulls the relevant pieces into the deal you’re looking at.

Ask the assistant; the workspace does the prep

1. Open the workspace. The Pipeline is the landing surface — open deals on one board, by stage. Every deal carries the contact, the linked email threads, and the upcoming meetings.
2. Ask the assistant to triage the inbox. It searches your Outlook mail for threads matching open deals, links the ones it finds to the right deal as activities, and flags the ones that look like they need a reply today.
3. Walk through today’s meetings. The assistant lists what’s upcoming on your Outlook calendar and pulls the pre-read for each one — the latest email thread with the attendees and the deal page for context — so you walk in already knowing where the conversation left off.
4. Send the reply or book the next step. When you decide what to do, the assistant drafts and sends it from your Outlook account. If a follow-up meeting needs to happen, it creates the calendar event and links it back to the deal as an activity.
5. Capture what got committed. After a call, jot a one-line debrief and the assistant turns it into action items on the deal’s activity timeline. Open commitments stay visible against the deal until you mark them done.

Pipeline shape, calendar, and segments

• Pipeline stages — the default multi-stage shape covers most founder-led sales. Add stages or rename them to match how you actually move deals.
• Calendar to watch — the workspace points at your primary Outlook calendar by default. If you keep work meetings on a separate calendar, point at that one instead.
• Customer segments — group contacts and leads by segment (e.g. design agencies, mid-market SaaS) so the assistant’s outreach and response stats stay scoped to one part of the book.
• Outreach message templates — per-segment templates the assistant uses as starting drafts. Each template carries effectiveness stats from past sends, so the shape that actually gets replies floats to the top.

Deals you run, prep that already happened

An exec assistant is useful only when it knows what you’re working on — and what you’re working on is your open deals. Wiring Outlook mail and calendar to the deal itself means the assistant never asks “which thread do you mean?” — it already has the thread, the meeting, and the last conversation pulled in. The workspace description is what you change when you reshape the pipeline, when you move your meetings to a different Outlook calendar, or when a new customer segment opens up and needs its own outreach shape.