'I closed my inbox and waited to see how the afternoon went' — I gave ChatGPT permission to watch my inbox, then stopped checking my email

ChatGPT Work ’s new event-triggered scheduled tasks offer an intriguing alternative to the compulsive email checking that fills my days.

The feature essentially acts as an AI-powered secretary, screening your Gmail inbox , Slack channels, and other communication channels, then alerting you or responding as you request in a prompt.

I decided to use the feature as an aggressively selective email assistant.

ChatGPT could watch everything arriving in my inbox, but it was only allowed to interrupt me when a message created an actual obligation, and it should suggest how to respond and have a draft ready to go.

Event-triggered tasks are available on eligible plans in ChatGPT on the web and mobile.

I used ChatGPT on the web and connected my Gmail account when prompted.

You can see the prompt I used below.

The current event triggers support new Gmail messages, which can optionally be narrowed by sender or subject.

I wanted ChatGPT to judge every incoming message by its contents, so I left the trigger broad and made the instructions selective.

That distinction matters.

The trigger decides when ChatGPT wakes up, while the prompt decides what it does once awake.

In my case, every new email could prompt a run, but only messages meeting my criteria were supposed to produce an alert.

I closed my inbox and waited to see how the afternoon went.

Here's how to do it (Image credit: Future) My original prompt was fairly basic.