How to Manage Your Email and Calendar in Notion - Notion AI Agents Connections
As Brian starts the day, he checks the calendar and the inbox to define the most important work to be done. During the night, his “team of agents” scheduled focused work sessions for the day and processed incoming emails, drafting replies and creating tasks when appropriate. Brian reviews the agents' output and makes adjustments to match his judgments, and then begins the work day.
The inbox and calendar are two of the foundational pieces of knowledge work, standing the test of time and remaining prominent in the ever-changing technological environment. The email inbox enables direct interactions one-to-one or one-to-many. The calendar allows coordinating and scheduling time with other people without the need to rely on memory alone.
Over time, ideas around their use have developed, emerging and fading away depending on historical and cultural contexts. A relatively modern concept concerning emails and calendar management revolves around the importance of protecting your time and energy to ensure you don’t spend all day reactively monitoring the inbox, but safeguard it to allow space for focused work on important projects that lead to desired progress in some areas of your business and life.
Depending on the stage of your life and your current beliefs, you may find the concepts of time blocking, inbox 0, and other tactical approaches attractive, impractical, or somewhere in between. Regardless, the concept of time/energy management applies to everyone.
Strategy is not tactics. There are many tactics (short-term approaches/methods) to inbox and calendar management, but what determines which tactics you try or discard is your strategy (the underlying philosophy behind how you behave in the domain of inbox and calendar management).
For example, believing that your energy and time are to be protected from random external requests in favor of working deeply on important projects is a strategy. Because of this strategy/belief, you may implement the tactic of checking the inbox only twice per day, blocking focused work sessions on the calendar, and not working for more than 6 hours each day.
Importantly, if there are no underlying beliefs/strategy, tactics won’t matter and your energy and time investments will be primarily dictated by other people’s requests. In the absence of a cohesive belief system, we default to activities that appear to produce the most instant gratification, which rarely coincide with those that are most impactful.
What Notion AI Can Do
Notion AI Agents can directly interact with your Notion Mail and Notion Calendar accounts (or Gmail and Google Calendar). This means retrieving, creating, organizing, updating, and deleting calendar events and emails on your behalf. This can be automated via Custom Agents or coordinated manually by chatting with custom agents or Notion AI Agent.
Notion Calendar and Notion Mail are distinct products in the Notion suite. The advantage of using Notion Calendar and Mail, if you use Notion, is that they integrate effectively in the ecosystem. You can also use AI Agent(s) to directly interact with those Notion products without leaving your Notion workspace, which has the potential to consolidate and clarify your entire workflows.
This consolidation can reduce context switching across tools, which frees up cognitive real estate, allowing for more space to innovate and reflect. Context switching is the practice of switching across different tools (and contexts) multiple times per day/hour, which drains energy because each context switch requires “loading” all the relevant resources, which differ across contexts.
That’s one step in the direction of implementing the concept of deep work. You can choose to engage in “deep” work instead of hyperactively reacting to other people’s requests all day. And the current tech tools can make implementation much easier to start and iterate on.
To use calendar and email connections with Notion AI Agent (the ever-present chat), you must connect your accounts via Settings > Notion AI > AI connectors. This allows you to select the connected accounts in the available sources when chatting with AI Agent.
To use calendar and email connections with custom agents, you must connect your calendar and email accounts on each agent that uses them, in the agent trigger/actions. If you already connected your accounts at the workspace level (as explained in the previous paragraph), you can just select those accounts (no need to re-connect).
Notion AI connectors, including calendar and email, available under Settings > Notion AI
Rethinking the Inbox
As Choudary argues in this essay, Agentic AI can be the railroads to canals—the advent of something completely new that reshuffles entire systems. To take full advantage of the technology, we must reconsider systems from first principles: What needs to be removed? Which workflows can be collapsed? How should the AI Agent Governance system work (guidelines, traces, evals, principles, human in the loop, etc.)?
In this context, AI can become an interesting playground to experiment and reshuffle your way of working. Consider emails as an example. You check your inbox at least once daily. It contains messages from people and companies—direct messages, promotional emails, broadcasts, and other categories. Direct emails matter most because they're personally addressed to you as part of ongoing conversations about specific projects or topics. Other email types are usually less important.
Your most critical email task is replying to people in ongoing conversations—understanding, reassuring, and taking other human actions in dialogue. However, the inbox can become a place of escape: checking emails because actual work is daunting and demands concentration and narrow focus. Plus, the anticipation of what might be in the inbox (similar to social media) is dopaminergic. Its intermittently rewarding (dopaminergic) nature causes a certain addiction rooted in the hope that you are indeed someone who has something to contribute to society, whose attention is requested by people, who has the influence to help others. So you check the inbox frequently because the feelings of validation, affiliation, and status that subtly transpire through this means of communication are addictive.
AI Agents can help establish systems (”railroads”, using Choudary’s analogy referenced previously) that raise and maintain behavioral standards, making new principles and behaviors easier to follow. Regardless, your behaviors around your work depend on your mindsets, no matter how agentic, powerful, modern, shiny the latest tools appear to be. Your mindsets are malleable and trainable to facilitate a life worth living for you, and this might be the most important investment you’ll ever make. As with most anything, this is a work in progress without an end state.
There is often a general psychological posture of resistance to emails, seeing them as an evil that has to be done and that creates anxiety because they contain so many requests from other people, whom we don’t want to let down primarily because of evolutionary reasons (wanting to belong, feel accepted and safe, respected and useful). Yet, the way you “feel” when processing emails is your decision, and it can be changed at any time with a simple shift in perspective or glimpse practiced many times, such as “what would I need to do to make this moment 10% more enjoyable?" (source: Joe Hudson).
Depending on where you are in your life, the last statement above may sound like total bullshit, or maybe you find it compelling and experience a small sense of spaciousness and calm within you upon reading the glimpse. Ultimately, emails are not a life or death situation; in fact, quite the opposite—one of the least dangerous things you do in your whole day. It is possible to apply a certain sense of lightness and craftsmanship to each email you process and reply to.
Practical Use Cases
Cal Newport popularized the concepts of deep work and time blocking—ideas that permeated the minds of many knowledge workers who lacked clear principles on how to do work, not just what to do. Notion AI Agents with calendar and email integrations can facilitate the applications of such principles, for example.
You can keep your initiatives and tasks in Notion, and work with AI Agents to time block your day or week following your preferences (which you can define in the prompt, and/or in one or multiple Notion pages) and your actual availability (based on your calendar events). This can be done as part of a Weekly Review, and/or at the start of each day (with this process, for example).
At a philosophical level, depending on where you are in your life, time blocking can be useful to gauge how you spend your time and direct your energy according to your vision, or it may not serve you any longer (if you have done it for a long time and maybe there is a sense of being trapped in it due to the fear of the consequences that you imagine stem from dropping it). This is an exciting part of living—that there is always room for evolution, change, new experiments, if you observe with curiosity and an action-oriented attitude.
Another concept popularized by Newport in A World Without Email is the idea that most emails require processing like any other task. Emails often contain implications of needed research or implementation/production. As such, they require energy and time, like any other task. So, one can treat the inbox as a means of task processing, where you receive inputs that often need to be turned into tasks to be done.
You can automate such processing by connecting Notion Mail with your Notion workspace and saving emails in a data source, which you use as a task tracking system to monitor statuses and other information about your emails that require action. You can give visibility to your team, so they are aware of your workload and progress.
Notion AI can also draft and send emails, if you give it permissions to do so. I am not yet sure about the value of this aspect, while I do find the process of saving emails to Notion compelling for facilitating task processing or simply tracking conversations as part of a CRM.
You can use Notion Mail or any other email service, and save emails into your data sources ad hoc using the browser extension or Flylighter. This way, the email inbox is for reading emails, some of which are action items that I save in Notion as tasks, which I process when I decide, before replying to the email thread conveniently linked on the task as a URL property.
Conclusion
Experimenting with different strategies and tactics to organize your email inbox and calendar is a never-ending process. Your mindset and behaviors around work dictate what you do, and more importantly, how you do it. What you used to do doesn’t matter as much as what you currently experiment with. AI can serve as a modern tool to facilitate your work processes; a playground for reflections and experimentations that enhance your personal capabilities.
