How To Use Ai to Compress Email Inbox Chaos HNZ Board Member Training

Video Replay for HNZ Board Members - How to Use Ai to Compress Your Email Inbox Chaos

Thanks so much for your time today - much appreciated!

Here's the replay as promised and a quick snapshot below of what we covered in today’s session. The focus point of this training was learning how to cut through inbox overload, pull out only the information that matters, and then consume that information in a format that suits you, in a far more streamlined and time-saving fashion.

What You Learnt, Key Takeaways

1. How to Clean Up Inbox Chaos

Why inbox overload is one of the biggest sources of burnout
How to reduce reading from hours a day down to minutes using AI summaries
The power of creating a dedicated AI news inbox or using Gmail labels to automatically sort information
How to get the AI to pull only relevant emails based on labels or categories

2. How to Use ChatGPT, Gemini, and NotebookLM Together

ChatGPT and Gemini can read emails, attachments, newsletters, reports, and even photos
Turning off web search for privacy and ensuring the AI only pulls from your Gmail or Drive
Why Gemini provides safer, siloed searches and avoids guessing from the web
NotebookLM acts as your research assistant that turns your uploaded material into summaries, mind maps, reports, audio, videos, and even mini slide decks

3. Building Fast AI Summaries for Briefings and Meetings

Creating quick executive summaries for policy updates, staff updates, sales reports or stakeholder emails
How to compress long threads or attachments into clear bullet points
Ideal for anyone juggling multiple businesses, high volume communication, or scattered updates

4. Setting Up an Automated AI News Workflow

Using an AI news only inbox to pull two week newsletter summaries
Extracting only tourism and hospitality relevance instead of reading everything manually
Turning summaries into short videos, newsletters, or briefing notes
How this workflow frees up huge amounts of mental space and time

5. Using NotebookLM for Time Compression

Upload up to 50 files free, or 300 files in the paid version, and let the AI merge and condense everything for you
Generates reports, infographics, flashcards, quizzes, slide decks, audio, and video
Clickable mind maps let you jump straight to the section you need without reading hundreds of pages

6. Teaching and Training Teams With AI

Automatically generate quizzes, training flashcards, and quick learning modules
Great for onboarding, sustainability modules, safety briefings or staff knowledge checks
All created instantly from your own documents

7. Privacy and Security Awareness

Why you must turn off web search when processing private data
Knowing which tool is safe for internal information, Gemini and NotebookLM, versus generic browsing in ChatGPT
When to consider bespoke agents for fully secure, private, automated workflows

8. Introduction to Agentic Workflows

How you can build a team of AI assistants who write your blogs, create your social posts, summarise email threads, or collect financial insights
Moving from doing everything manually to becoming a manager of an AI team
Why agentic workflows remove operational debt and free up human time for customers, leadership and high value work

Resources Mentioned

AI Tools

ChatGPT, used for summarising email, drafting content, and early agent workflows
Google Gemini, safer data handling and strong for email and Drive summarisation
NotebookLM, the time compression engine for generating reports, mind maps, audio, video and training assets
Google Drive and Gmail, for labelled inboxes and clean data organisation