Confession time.
Over the summer, my inbox went completely feral—full-on, cuckoo-for-Cocoa-Puffs out of control. By the time I rolled back into my office chair, more than 800 of them were waiting for me. And not the harmless kind you can breeze through with a quick skim and archive, either. These were the messy, high-maintenance, “Chelle, you actually have to do something about this” emails—Calls, support requests, and a steady stream of project updates kept pouring in—each one needing me to actually do something before I could reply.
And instead of firing off a quick “got it, I’ll get back to you,” I let them sit. They piled up like unopened mail on the kitchen counter, a horrible habit that only made things worse.
Did I immediately sit down and power through them like a responsible adult? Absolutely not. I opened Gmail, took one look, and decided that triaging a handful here and there was “good enough.” Spoiler: it wasn’t. Every day I chipped away at the pile, and every day it grew taller, louder, and more impossible to ignore.
Eventually I hit the wall. I couldn’t out-organize or out-willpower my way through 800+ action items, and I was tired of the inbox dictating my schedule. So I did what I always do when the chaos wins—I built an automation. This time it wasn’t about saving a few clicks. It was about survival.
N8N Has Entered the Chat
Now, I’ve tried a lot of automation tools, and most of them can shuffle emails around just fine. But here’s where I kept hitting the wall: Make.com, which I still use every day for plenty of other things, falls apart the moment Gmail threads are involved. Instead of pulling the full conversation, it only grabs the last reply. And in my inbox, nine times out of ten that “reply” is nothing more than a polite throwaway—“thanks” or “got it”—with none of the context that came before. When I’m staring down hundreds of emails that all require action, context isn’t optional. It’s the only way I can tell if I’m supposed to confirm a meeting, update a project, or just acknowledge a support request.
And it doesn’t stop there. When I wanted to go a step further and have my automation draft or send a reply, Make.com completely tripped over its own feet. Out of the box, it just couldn’t do it. To make it work, I had to bolt on six extra steps, wire up a bunch of conditions and filters, and even drop in actual Python code. At that point it didn’t feel like no-code automation anymore—it felt like punishment for asking my tools to be useful.
So I switched gears and built the workflow in n8n instead. It runs on a schedule—midnight, 7am, 10am, 1pm, 4pm, and 7pm—so my inbox gets cleaned out several times a day without me lifting a finger. First it pulls in all my unread emails, then it checks a few variables to make sure the message is actually waiting on me to take action. From there, it pushes each email through a classification step that sorts them into buckets.
And these buckets aren’t just the usual “receipts” or “spam” kind of folders. I’ve trained the system to recognize the specific areas of my business: Author Nation, Indie Author Magazine, Indie Author Training, Direct2Readers, and Author Automations. On top of that, I’ve got buckets for support requests, social notifications, meeting assets, fraud or security alerts, and yes, the occasional sales pitch.
Here’s the clever bit: when an email lands in one of those business buckets, the workflow checks against a shared Google Doc that I keep updated with core information. For example, there’s one doc for Author Nation, one for Indie Author Training, one for Direct2Readers, and so on. That means the system already “knows” the basic answers, policies, or links for each project. My team and I can add to those docs anytime, so they become a living knowledge base without me needing to build a giant database.
Once the classification step is done, the workflow drafts a reply in Gmail using that context. All I have to do is review the drafts, make quick tweaks if needed, and hit send. The rest gets labeled and archived automatically. Instead of wading through a swamp of messages, I’m left with just the ones that genuinely require my attention.
The magic here isn’t that it sorts emails into neat little piles. Plenty of tools can do that. What makes this workflow powerful is the combination of context and control.
First, n8n grabs the entire Gmail thread, not just the last reply. The workflow sees the whole conversation and classifies it based on the actual content, not a throwaway “thanks.”
Second, the Google Docs integration means my replies have accurate, up-to-date information and sound like me because they’re pulling from information I’ve already written. I want it to pull the right policy, the right link, or the right tone from the Google docs we can update as needed.
And third, the human review step matters. I don’t want to hand over my inbox completely. The workflow takes care of the heavy lifting—sorting, labeling, drafting—but I still get the final say. All I have to do is buzz through the drafts, tweak a word here or there, and hit send. Ten minutes later, I’ve cleared what used to take me an entire afternoon.
This is the sweet spot of automation for me. It’s not about replacing myself—it’s about giving myself a head start.
The video in this week’s issue is a walkthrough of the automation in action. You can see what I start and end with. This is just for my personal inbox. I’ve cloned this automation for the other 8 boxes I manage to do the same thing.
If you’re a paid subscriber, you get the keys to this kingdom. I’ve bundled up the full n8n workflow so you can import it straight into your own setup. No reinventing the wheel, no trying to squint at screenshots and rebuild it from scratch—you’ll have the actual file I use every day to keep my inbox under control.
And because I know the magic isn’t in the file, it’s in the setup, I’m also hosting a live done-with-you webinar on September 30th at 12N Central. We’ll walk through the entire thing together, step by step, and you’ll have the chance to get your questions answered in real time. By the end of that session, you won’t just understand how the workflow works—you’ll have your own version up and running.
This is the kind of system that pays for itself the first time you don’t spend three hours stuck in Gmail.
If you’re a free subscriber, you can join this webinar, too! You can register for $39 here, or upgrade your newsletter subscription and I’ll send you the coupon code.
