Handing over your inbox
without losing control
Email is the most-delegated and worst-delegated task there is. Done properly it gives you back five hours a week. Done the usual way — password shared, no rules, "just help with emails" — it creates more work than it removes.
Inbox delegation fails for a boringly consistent reason: nobody decides in advance what the assistant is allowed to send. So every email becomes a question, the assistant becomes a bottleneck, and within three weeks the owner quietly takes it back.
The fix is not a better assistant. It's a decision made once, up front, about which messages they answer, which they schedule, and which come to you. Everything else follows from that.
This is the method we set up with clients, including the access arrangement — because sharing your password is both unnecessary and, in most professional contexts, a breach of your own obligations.
Who this is for
✓Worth your time if
- You get more than fifty emails a day and most need no judgement from you
- Your calendar is booked by email ping-pong
- You answer the same six questions every week in slightly different words
- You've tried delegating email before and pulled it back
✕Probably not if
- Your inbox is genuinely all high-judgement client correspondence
- You aren't willing to write down what a good reply looks like (this needs an hour of your time up front)
- You need someone to make commitments on your behalf without a rule set
Three buckets, decided once
Every incoming message goes to exactly one bucket. The whole system is deciding the boundaries between them, in writing, before day one.
Anything with a known answer: availability, pricing already published, document requests, scheduling, standard onboarding questions, supplier confirmations. Build a template library as you go — after a fortnight, most of this bucket is a template with two edited lines.
Anything that needs you but not now: meeting requests, callbacks, anything with a deadline. It goes in the calendar with the context attached, so when you arrive at it you don't have to re-read the thread.
New business, complaints, anything financial, anything from a name on your escalation list, anything they aren't sure about. The rule is explicit: uncertainty escalates. Never guess.
One message at the end of their day: what was handled, what's waiting on you, what they were unsure about. Five lines. This is what makes the whole thing feel safe in the first month, and it's the thing most people skip.
Booking, rescheduling, buffers, travel time, and defending the blocks you've said are protected. Give them the rules — no meetings before 9, no more than two calls back to back — and let them enforce it, because they will and you won't.
A one-off job worth doing in week one: unsubscribing, filtering and archiving the noise. Most inboxes shrink by a third before any real delegation starts.
Access, done properly
You never share a password. Both Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace have delegation built in, and using it means every action is attributable and revocable in one click.
- Password sharingIt breaks attribution, it usually breaks your MFA policy, and in regulated industries it may breach your obligations outright. Use delegated access or a shared mailbox instead.
- Sending as you, unannouncedDecide whether they send from their own address on your behalf or as a delegate — recipients see the difference, and the wrong choice erodes trust. We recommend a delegate signature that says who is writing.
- Financial instructionsAnything that changes bank details, approves a payment or commits money is bucket three, always, no exceptions. This is where invoice fraud lives.
- Legal or HR correspondenceGrievances, disputes and anything from a lawyer come straight to you unopened by anyone else.
The first fortnight
The goal of week one is not a tidy inbox. It's a shared understanding of what a good reply looks like.
Day one — watch, don't touch
They read the inbox with no send rights and draft replies for your review. You approve or edit. It feels slow and it is the fastest route to competence, because every edit teaches them your voice more precisely than any style guide.
Day two to five — draft and release
They draft, you release. By Friday you'll notice you're editing almost nothing in bucket one — that's the signal to hand it over properly.
Week two — bucket one goes live
They send bucket one unsupervised, with the daily digest as your safety net. Keep buckets two and three under review. Resist the urge to check the sent folder more than once a day.
Week two — build the templates
Every reply they send twice becomes a template. After a fortnight most inboxes have eight to twelve templates covering the bulk of routine correspondence, which is what makes the role scale beyond email later.
End of week two — review the escalations
Look at what they escalated. Anything escalated twice that you answered the same way both times becomes a new bucket-one rule. Repeat this monthly and the escalation list shrinks steadily.
"Just help me with emails"
It sounds like delegation and it isn't — it's handing over responsibility with no authority, which produces an assistant who has to ask about everything. The result is predictable: within three weeks you're answering more questions than emails, you conclude it isn't working, and you take the inbox back. The hour spent writing down the three buckets before they start is the difference between five hours a week returned and a fortnight wasted. If you do nothing else from this guide, do that.