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Join the waitlist →The AI Chief of Staff Setup: let Claude answer your team's simple emails and only bring you what needs you
If your team emails you all day with questions, you're the bottleneck in your own business. AI can take the simple ones and make sure you only see what actually needs you.
Here's what mine does. A Claude routine checks my email every few minutes for messages from my team. The simple questions, it answers in my voice. Anything only I can decide (money, a login, a decision) it sends me on Telegram in one line. And it has hard rules: it never sends passwords, never agrees to prices I haven't approved, and never forwards anything.
I didn't start there, and you shouldn't either. This guide builds it in safe stages: first a read-only morning brief, then drafts you send yourself, and only later (if you want) replies that send on their own for a short list of people. Claude is the main tool. ChatGPT has similar connectors and scheduled tasks, so the prompts work there too. What you can connect and schedule depends on your plan, so check what yours includes.
Step 1: Connect Claude to your email and calendar
In Claude, open Settings, then Connectors, and connect Gmail and Google Calendar (Microsoft 365 works if your plan offers it). Sign in yourself and approve the access on the Google or Microsoft screen. Claude can then read and search your mail and calendar when you ask.
Start by asking it to look, not act.
Check its sorting against what you would have done. This is how you find out what it gets right before you trust it with more.
Step 2: Get a morning brief
Do this by hand for a few days. Each time it misses something, tell it, and add the fix to the instructions.
A quick example. A plumbing company owner has an office manager and three techs who email all day. The brief shows: two jobs to quote (a decision for the owner), four "what's the address for tomorrow" questions (answered in the job calendar), one upset customer (to the top), and "9 supplier emails, nothing needed." The owner spends five minutes on it instead of an hour in the inbox.
Step 3: Put the brief on a schedule
Once the brief is useful, stop asking for it. Claude can run scheduled tasks on some plans and apps (look for scheduled tasks or routines). ChatGPT has scheduled tasks too. Set it for the time you start your day.
If your plan doesn't have scheduling, keep running it by hand each morning. You still get most of the value.
Step 4: Write your rules block
This is the most important step. The rules are what make it safe to let AI touch your inbox at all. Copy this block, fill it in, and paste it at the top of every instruction you give your chief of staff from here on.
Keep this block in one document. When something goes wrong, the fix goes here, so it never happens again.
Step 5: Let it draft replies, and you hit send
Now it can write, but nothing leaves your inbox without you. The Gmail connector can create drafts. You open your drafts, read each one, fix it if needed, and send it yourself.
Run this in drafts-only mode for weeks, not days. Keep a short note of every draft you had to change and why. When you're barely changing anything for a few weeks in a row, you know which kinds of questions it handles well. Those, and only those, are candidates for the next step.
Step 6: Set up your one-line alerts
The point is that you only see what needs you, wherever you are. Pick one channel you actually check: text, Telegram, Slack, or an email to yourself with a clear subject line. I use Telegram.
Getting a message to your phone is a one-time setup. Email to yourself is the simplest. For Telegram, Slack or text, you'd connect it through Claude Code or an automation tool like Zapier, Make or n8n.
Step 7: Optional and advanced: let it answer a short list of senders
This is what I run now. Only do it after weeks of drafts where you've barely changed a thing. It needs a setup that can send email on a schedule, such as Claude Code running a routine with a mail connection, or an automation tool. The rules block does the heavy lifting.
Read the daily log every day at first. Tell your team that some quick answers come from your assistant, and that anything important still comes to you.
Mistakes to avoid:
- Starting with sending. Start read-only, then drafts, for weeks.
- Letting it reply to anyone outside your team. Customers and vendors stay with you.
- Vague rules. "Be careful with money" is not a rule. "Never agree to a price not on this list" is.
- Never reading the log. You're still responsible for every email it sends.
Unlock the full guide
- My own chief of staff instructions and rules block, line by line
- How I set up the Telegram alerts and the every-few-minutes routine
- Ready-made briefs for owners, office managers and sales teams
- Live sessions: we set up your morning brief together
- Every new AI workflow I build for my own businesses
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