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Tool of the week

You think: “I need a developer for that.”

Every attachment, filed

The moment

Quotes, invoices and site photos arrive as attachments all day, and every one has to end up in the right job folder. Somebody opens the email, reads it, works out which job it belongs to, downloads the file, renames it, drags it into the folder. Forty times a day.

The cost

Call it thirty seconds each. Twenty minutes a day, a hundred minutes a week, and the one time it is filed under the wrong job is the time the estimator needs it.

The rule. Write this first.

An attachment belongs to the job whose number appears in the subject or the first lines of the email. If there is no job number, it is not filed. It is held for a person.

Everybody wants to buy the tool that does this. The tool is the easy part. The thing nobody does first is write the rule. Once that one sentence exists, the tool is a filter, a folder and one prompt.

The five-minute version.

The rule decides. The prompt only reads. A person clears Hold every morning, and that is the whole system.

  1. 1Write the rule above at the top of a note, in your own words. Change nothing else until it is written.
  2. 2Make the folders: one per job, named by the job number, and one more called Hold.
  3. 3In your mail, make a filter: any message with an attachment gets the label To file.
  4. 4Once a day, paste the subject and first lines of each To file message, plus your list of job numbers, into the prompt below.
  5. 5File what came back with a job number. Everything that came back HOLD goes to the Hold folder, and a person clears Hold each morning.

The prompt

Paste it as written. The parts in double braces are yours to fill in.

Here is a list of job numbers: {{job numbers}}. Here is the subject and the first lines of an email: {{subject and first lines}}. Reply with exactly one job number from the list if one appears in the text, or the word HOLD if none does. Reply with nothing else.

Next week’s tool.

One a week, Thursdays, by email. Say which pile is yours.

Watch one built live.

Two hours, one owner’s real problem built in front of the room, the templates to take home.

The workshop