Three weeks in. Let's catch our breath.
We've covered three things, and they stack on purpose.
A token is the chunk AI chops your words into before it does anything. It’s the meter, so it gets counted and billed, and it’s the memory, so run past the limit and it forgets the start of your chat. When AI feels expensive or forgetful, now you know why.
A prompt that works is three pieces. Context, so it knows who and what. An example, so it can see what good looks like. Format, so it gives you the shape you want back. That’s the whole “prompt engineering course” nobody should pay for.
The right tool is, for almost everybody, just one. Claude.ai. The chat window. Your home base. The others are graduations you reach for the day you hit a wall and think “I wish it could just go do this for me.”
Here’s the thing. You can read all three and change nothing about your week. So this weekend I don’t want you to read. I want you to feel it.
Your task: clean out your inbox with a prompt
You know the junk. Newsletters you never open. Stores you bought from once in 2021. “We miss you” emails from apps you forgot you downloaded.
Remember Part 3. You live in Claude.ai until you hit a wall and think “I wish it could just go do this for me.” Cleaning out an inbox is that wall. It isn’t thinking work, it’s hands work. So this is the rare day-one task where you’re allowed to reach past the chat window.
My daughter did exactly that this weekend. She downloaded the desktop app, turned Cowork and Chrome loose on her inbox, and her word was “wow.” You don’t have to go that far. You can do the whole thing from Claude.ai by having it build you the plan. But if you want to watch AI actually click the buttons for you, this is a safe place to try it.
Either way, write the prompt with all three pieces from Part 2:
I want to clean out my email inbox. I get too much junk. Newsletters I never read, promotional emails from stores, app notifications I don’t care about. Here are five real subject lines from my inbox right now: [paste 5]. Based on those, tell me in a simple checklist which categories are safe to unsubscribe from and which I should keep, then give me the exact steps to mass-unsubscribe in Gmail or Outlook. Keep it short enough to finish in one sitting.
Then do the part that matters. Reply or comment with what you cleaned out, or what surprised you. And send this to the one person you know whose inbox is worse than yours.
Part 4 of 10 lands next week. Subscribe so it shows up in your inbox.
Matt LavaHopper, minus the hype.
Catch up on the first three: What the heck is a token? · How to write a prompt that works · Which tool for which job