Find what an email thread needs from you

Read this email thread and work out what is required of me.

Thread (oldest first):
[PASTE THE THREAD]

I am: [YOUR NAME AND ROLE]
My email address: [SO YOU CAN TELL WHICH MESSAGES ARE MINE]

Produce four sections.

1. WHAT I NEED TO DO — each item with the deadline if one was given, who is waiting on it, and which message it came from. Order by deadline, soonest first. If a deadline was implied rather than stated ("before the review"), say so.

2. QUESTIONS ASKED OF ME THAT I NEVER ANSWERED — go through every message addressed to me and check whether the thread contains my reply. This is the section I am most likely to have got wrong.

3. WHAT I AM WAITING ON — what I asked for, from whom, and how long ago.

4. DECIDED IN THE THREAD — anything settled along the way, so I do not reopen it.

Ignore pleasantries, signatures, and quoted text repeated in every reply. If two messages contradict each other, show both and say which came later.

A thread with forty messages is not a reading problem, it is a search problem — and the thing hardest to find in it is what you failed to do. Your own obligations are scattered across other people's paragraphs, usually in the second half of a message whose first half was about something else. Ask for a summary and you get a chronological account, which is the least useful possible shape: it tells you how the thread developed when what you need is what is outstanding.

The section that earns this prompt its place is the second one. Unanswered questions are almost invisible from the inside, because you remember the message arriving and you remember thinking about it, and neither of those is a reply. Having the thread checked message by message for questions directed at you, against replies you actually sent, surfaces things that have been quietly pending for weeks.

1. Include your own messages

   Paste the whole thread, not just what other people wrote. Section two works by matching questions against your replies — without your side it cannot tell answered from unanswered and will over-report.

2. Give it your email address

   Threads with several participants and forwarded sections get attributed wrongly otherwise. One line of identification removes most of the confusion about which obligations are yours.

3. Keep the timestamps

   Section four depends on knowing which of two contradictory messages came later, and 'how long ago' in section three is only useful if the dates survived the paste.

4. Run it before you reply, not before you read

   This is for reconstructing state on a thread you have lost track of. On a thread you are following, it will mostly tell you what you already know.

• When the thread contains things you would not paste into a toolSalary discussions, medical details, legal strategy, other people's personal information. Redact before pasting or do not use this — the thread is someone else's information as much as yours.
• When the real obligation was agreed in a callIt can only read what is in the thread. If the actual commitment was made verbally and the thread only alludes to it, the list will be confidently incomplete.
• On threads where tone is the substanceA negotiation or a conflict is carried in phrasing, not action items. Extracting the tasks strips out precisely the part you need to handle carefully.

• EverydayApolloPrepare for a difficult conversationTurns a conversation you are dreading into an opening line, the three likeliest pushbacks with an answer to each, and the point where you should stop talking.
• WritingApolloRemove AI tells from a draftRewrites text that reads as machine-written, then lists the specific phrases and structures that gave it away so you stop producing them.
• LearningApolloLearn a topic and get quizzed on itExplains something at three levels of detail, then questions you on it and reports which specific part you did not actually have.
• ResearchRagnarökCompare options and see where they differCompares the options on the things that would actually change your decision, and says separately which differences do not apply to you.