It’s August. You’re supposed to be on vacation. But we all know what “vacation” actually looks like: checking email from the pool, responding to Slack on the beach, telling yourself you’ll fully unplug tomorrow. Here are some rituals we’ve built into how our agents run every day (and especially when we’re out of office) that you might want to try.
Let’s get into it.
Agent Hacks
Inbox triage. Every three hours between 7 AM and 10 PM, our agent scans Gmail through an MCP connection and sorts incoming email into buckets: needs us, someone else can handle, doesn’t matter. We come back to 15 emails that matter instead of 400 that don’t.
Auto-drafts. We have our agents draft routine emails and queue them up for our review. You may want to implement this so that when you’re sipping a drink at the swim-up bar you can approve drafts instead of writing them.
Client follow-ups. Ask your agent “Check in with them Thursday and again Monday if there’s no reply.” The agent creates the reminder so nobody feels ignored while you’re gone.
Meeting prep from actual context. We have a background job pull our meeting notes every 30 minutes. So instead of looking at a calendar full of vague titles like “Sync” and “Check-in” and guessing what’s worth keeping on the calendar, you can ask the agent “what have these meetings actually produced lately?” and get a real answer. This makes it way easier to decide what to cancel, reschedule, or skip entirely.
Monitor the agent itself. Your vacation agent is only useful if it’s still running on day six. Our agents have a watchdog that checks a heartbeat every five minutes. If the connection stalls (which happens when the laptop sleeps, for example) it restarts automatically.
Get yourself an agent who understands the assignment.
You vs. Sunday Scaries
None of this is about working from vacation. It’s about not dreading coming back. Set your agent up before you leave, and you might actually read a book this summer.
Stay curious,
Julia & Russell
