triage-rubric.md

Triage rubric

Which calls earn an email, which get nothing, and how open commitments age. The sweep's value is subtraction: a run that drafts one email per call has replaced a calendar, not a judgment.

Does this call earn an email?

A call earns a draft if any one of these is true:

Trigger	Weight	Note
The user committed to something	Always	One unshipped promise is sufficient on its own. No other trigger is needed.
A number, price, or SLA was said aloud	Always	Put it in writing correctly now, or inherit the buyer's version of it later.
A date was named by the buyer	High	Their date sets the cadence; acknowledge it in writing so it becomes shared.
A new stakeholder appeared or was promised	High	The email is what gets forwarded to them. Write it for the person who wasn't there.
A question went unanswered	High	Answer it in the draft, or name the date you will.
Next step discussed but not on a calendar	Medium	The draft's only job is to convert it to a booked slot.
An objection surfaced for the second time	Medium	Address it in writing, plainly, once.

A call earns no email when all of the following hold:

Neither side committed to anything.
No number, price, or date was said aloud.
The next meeting is already on the calendar.
No new stakeholder, no unanswered question, no repeated objection.

In practice this covers standing check-ins, mid-project status calls, and already-booked second meetings. On a typical week sweep, roughly half to two thirds of calls earn no email — if a sweep is drafting for 90% of the book, the triage is not running and the output is noise.

Three additional no-email cases, regardless of triggers:

Already handled. A thread to that account exists post-call. Say so; do not draft a second one.
Internal call. No external attendee — extract commitments for the aging report only.
Unverified call. No recording, no transcript, no notes. It goes on the coverage list as unread. Never draft from a calendar title alone.

Dedupe rules

One account, one email. Multiple calls with the same account inside one window collapse into a single draft built from all of them, addressed to the most senior participant who was on the most recent call.
One thread, one ask. If two calls with an account produced two unrelated asks, the draft carries the one that gates the other and names the second as coming separately.
Different accounts, same parent company stay separate unless the same person was on both calls.

Aging thresholds

Applied to every open commitment carried forward from prior sweeps. These are business days from the call the commitment was made on.

Age	State	What the sweep does
0–2 days	Fresh	List under the account. No special treatment.
3–5 days	Aging	Flag it. Lead the account's draft with it.
6–10 days	Overdue	Surface at the top of the sweep report, above all fresh drafts, with the original quote and date.
11+ days	Rotted	Report separately. Do not silently fold into a normal follow-up — a two-week-late promise needs the delay named in the draft, not glossed over.

Two rules that matter more than the thresholds:

A commitment with no date attached ages from the call date, not from some implied grace period. "I'll send that over" made eleven days ago is rotted, not pending.
Aging beats freshness in the report order, always. A user reading a sweep top-to-bottom should hit their oldest broken promise before their newest drafted email. Ordering the report by call date instead of by age is the most common way this skill gets rendered useless.

Coverage reporting

Every sweep states, before any draft: calls in window, calls read, calls unverified, drafts produced, no-email count, open commitments by age bucket. A sweep that reports drafts without reporting coverage is claiming completeness it has not earned.