Which Emails Need My Approval? Use Max to Prepare a Decision List

Emails need your approval when they ask for a decision or commitment that belongs to you, rather than information someone else can provide. Ask Max to collect those requests into a decision list with context, recommendations and draft replies, then authorize any email, meeting booking or publication separately.

Which emails belong on your approval list?

An unread email is not automatically a decision. Neither is a message marked urgent. The useful question is: Does this request require the owner's judgment, authority or commitment?

Typical candidates include:

• Spending decisions: approving a purchase, renewal or expense outside delegated limits.
• Commercial exceptions: agreeing to a discount, refund or change in payment terms.
• People decisions: resolving a hiring question or a sensitive issue that requires your involvement.
• External commitments: accepting a speaking invitation or agreeing to a delivery date.
• Public statements: approving a proposed announcement or customer-facing position.

Routine status updates, receipts and informational copies usually do not belong on the decision list. A question a colleague can answer within their authority is general inbox work, not necessarily an owner approval request.

Define that boundary before asking Max to sort. If your delegation rules are unclear, ask Max to flag uncertainty rather than assume someone has authority.

How does Max prepare a useful decision list?

Max is Donetra's AI chief of staff. It learns from your email and memory, so you can ask for a focused view of requests instead of working through every thread yourself.

Start with a bounded instruction:

Max, review this week's email for requests that need my decision. Separate them from updates and routine questions. For each request, summarize the decision, relevant context, stated deadline and missing information. Recommend a next step and prepare a draft reply. Do not send anything, book meetings or publish.

This makes email approval management about decisions, not just sorting messages.

What should each item include?

Ask for a consistent format:

• Decision needed: the specific question you must answer.
• Source: the sender and thread subject, so you can check the original.
• Context: relevant commitments, prior discussion and constraints.
• Timing: the stated deadline, or “no deadline stated.”
• Recommendation: a proposed next step with a brief reason.
• Unknowns: missing facts that could change the decision.
• Draft response: wording for your review, not a sent message.

Keep facts separate from recommendations. “The supplier requests a Friday answer” is evidence from the thread. “We should renew” is a recommendation that needs your judgment.

What does a practical AI approval workflow look like?

Consider a hypothetical inbox containing a supplier renewal, a customer discount request, an event invitation and several project updates.

Step 1: Set your decision boundaries

Tell Max what you retain and what others can handle:

Bring supplier commitments, nonstandard customer discounts and speaking invitations to me. Keep routine project updates in a separate summary. Flag requests where ownership is unclear.

Use your actual rules. Do not let an assistant invent spending thresholds or infer delegated authority from job titles alone.

Step 2: Collect and separate the requests

Ask Max to organize the result into three groups:

1. Ready for your decision: enough information is available to choose.
2. Needs clarification: the request is blocked by missing facts.
3. No owner decision needed: updates and routine questions.

This prevents incomplete requests from looking ready for approval. It also keeps general inbox work visible without letting it dominate the list.

Step 3: Review context and recommendations

For the supplier renewal, a useful item might look like this:

Decision: Renew the supplier agreement or request more information?
Context: The supplier has requested confirmation, but the thread does not establish the cancellation terms.
Recommendation: Request those terms before deciding.
Draft reply: “Please send the cancellation terms and confirm whether the renewal changes our existing scope. We'll review before confirming.”

The recommendation does not pretend the renewal is ready. The draft advances the discussion without accepting the agreement.

Step 4: Make the business decision

You might say:

I agree that we should request the cancellation terms. Keep the renewal undecided.

That approves the proposed approach. It does not explicitly authorize Max to send the draft.

Step 5: Authorize the external action separately

After checking the recipient and wording, give a specific instruction:

Send the supplier clarification draft shown above to the sender in that renewal thread, with no changes and no additional recipients.

Max never sends email, books meetings or publishes without your explicit approval. Keep authorization tied to the action and version you reviewed.

Is approving a recommendation the same as approving an action?

No. A business decision and permission to execute it are separate.

Your response	What it establishes
“That recommendation makes sense.”	Agreement with the reasoning, not permission to act externally.
“Approve the discount.”	A commercial decision, not explicit permission to email the customer.
“Send this exact reply to the customer in this thread.”	Authorization for the specified email.
“The event sounds worthwhile.”	Interest, not permission to book a meeting or publish an announcement.

An AI assistant with human approval should preserve those distinctions. Avoid a blanket “looks good” for a list containing unrelated actions. If you want several actions completed, identify each one explicitly.

How do you keep the list useful over time?

Give Max feedback when a request is misclassified: “This is an update,” “This needs my decision,” or “Ask me when authority is unclear.” State any recurring delegation rule directly rather than expecting it to emerge from a single example.

For AI executive inbox management, the goal is a clear separation between what needs your judgment, what needs more information and what does not need you. Max prepares the context and drafts. You make the decisions and explicitly authorize external actions.