A small volunteer board. One big annual event. The inbox started running itself.

The situation

A small volunteer board running a national federation and its biggest event of the year. Full-time jobs on the side. One shared Gmail account for everything: membership questions, sponsors, event logistics, the lot.

The inbox never emptied. The board took turns drafting replies, chasing each other on WhatsApp, and trying to remember who said they'd handle what at the last meeting. Sound familiar?

What we built

We set up five things, each one handling a specific part of the admin pain:

• Email drafter: reads every new message, writes a reply in the board's voice, drops it in Gmail drafts. One click to send.
• Skip-list: MobilePay, hosting invoices, auto-senders. Filtered out. Never generates a draft.
• Meeting notes: paste in the board meeting doc, get back a task sheet with every action item assigned and colour-coded, one colour per board member.
• Inbox cleaner: once the board replies to a thread, it archives itself. No manual tidying.
• Tuesday briefing: lands at 06:00 after the Monday night board meeting. This week's calendar, open tasks, anything urgent. No digging.

Two weeks in

The board stopped spending Sunday evenings in the inbox. Their May board meeting notes turned into a sorted, assigned, colour-coded task list in under a minute. Their secretary saw the first draft and said it made her excited.

• ~5 hours back per week
• A full meeting doc to a task list, zero manual work
• Inbox backlog gone within the first week
• No more "what did we agree on?" messages on WhatsApp

Is this for you?

They signed in spring and went live within the month, and ran the system through their busiest weeks of the year. They were our first external client. If your forening runs on volunteers, a shared inbox and a Google Sheet, it is the same setup.