AI for project management in Gmail
Most project "tasks" are born as emails. Your assistant catches them at birth: onto the board, prioritised, deadlined — and it writes the weekly summary you keep postponing.
What you'll end up with
- Action items from email captured as cards the moment they're agreed.
- Lists ordered by real priority — deadlines and blockers on top, not whatever arrived last.
- A weekly status summary drafted from the board, ready to paste or send.
Before you start
- Sortd set up in Gmail — a Project board with lists like Backlog, This week, Doing, Blocked, Done.
- Your assistant connected — two minutes, one browser approval: Connect your AI. Everything below works in Claude, ChatGPT, or any connected assistant.
- The right permissions — when you connect you tick what the assistant may do — send permissions start unticked. For this guide: reading email, reading and updating the board.
Set it up by talking to your assistant
Each step is something you type (or say) to your assistant — copy them as they are, or change the names to match your own boards and lists. You don't need to know what happens behind the scenes, but we explain it anyway.
1. Catch commitments as cards
The "can you also…" emails that evaporate — caught.
Go through this week's project email. Wherever we agreed to do something, make a card on Project / Backlog linked to the thread, titled with the action, with a due date if one was mentioned.What happens: Each commitment becomes a card linked to the email where it was agreed — provenance included.
2. Plan the week
Prioritising is deciding — the assistant does the shuffling.
Move everything due in the next 7 days from Backlog to This week, and order This week by due date with blockers of other tasks on top.What happens: Cards move and the list reorders — the board opens Monday already telling the truth about the week.
3. Keep Blocked meaningful
A Blocked list only helps if things leave it.
For each card in Blocked, check its thread — if the blocker replied, move it back to This week and tell me. If nothing has moved in a week, list who we're waiting on.What happens: The assistant reads each blocked card's thread for movement — the list stops being where tasks go to be forgotten.
4. The Friday summary
The status report, written by something that was actually watching.
Write my Friday project summary from the board: what moved to Done this week, what's in Doing, what's blocked and on whom, and what's due next week. Keep it to ten lines.What happens: A concise, accurate summary from board history — paste it into chat, mail or the meeting doc.
Put it on autopilot
Once a run works when you ask for it, schedule it — capture daily, plan Mondays, summarise Fridays — all three schedule cleanly.
Every weekday at 5pm, capture new commitments from project email onto Project / Backlog. Mondays at 8, plan the week. Fridays at 3, write my ten-line status summary.Claude (Cowork scheduled tasks) and ChatGPT (scheduled tasks) can both do this — cadences, tips and more recipes are on AI Schedule.
You stay in control
- Drafts by default. Unless you granted a send permission, the assistant can only prepare replies — they wait in Gmail for a human to send.
- Everything is visible. Every card the assistant creates or moves shows up on the board instantly, exactly as if a teammate did it — same statuses, same history, same audit trail.
- Easy to undo, easy to unplug. Moves and statuses can be changed back on the board, and you can disconnect the assistant at any time from the same place you connected it.
More: AI for operations inboxes · every action the assistant can take, with example prompts: AI Reference · all use cases: AI guides