Steuart Snooks, email and workplace productivity expert and author of Triage Your Inbox, explains more.
An air traffic controller never hands off a plane and walks away. Once contact is made, the aircraft stays on their scope until another controller formally takes over – verbally, on record, every time. Nothing is ever just out there and hoped for. Control is always assigned, never assumed.
Compare that to how most executive inboxes run. An EA sends a request to the CFO’s office, notes ‘waiting on finance’ in her task list, and moves to the next item. Nobody has control of that request anymore. It’s not with her as she’s mentally filed it as done. It’s not really with finance either as it’s one line in someone else’s queue of two hundred. The request is airborne with no-one watching the scope.
That gap (the space between sending and actually landing an outcome) is where an EA’s credibility can erode, one unrecorded handoff at a time.
A pattern hiding in plain sight
I see this constantly in my coaching work. When I sit down with EAs to build out their Triage Operating System (the framework at the heart of my book Triage Your Inbox) we work through their next actions column together. And the same phrase turns up again and again: ‘waiting for.’
The Triage Operating System runs every item that lands in an inbox through a 4D Decision Tree – Delete, Deal with, Delegate, or Decide. Nothing sits unprocessed and nothing is left vague. You dispose of it, action it now, hand it to someone else or decide the next concrete step and when it’s due.
‘Waiting for’ doesn’t survive contact with that framework as it’s a state, not a step. It describes what’s happening (nothing, yet) rather than what will happen next. A follow-up is proactive; a decision, with a date attached, that keeps you in charge of the outcome. They can describe the exact same email, sent five minutes ago, but only one of them protects your executive’s deadline.
There’s a cost beyond the deadline too. ‘Waiting for’ leaves an open loop. And open loops don’t sit quietly in the background. Some part of your attention keeps circling back to check on it, all day, every day it stays open.
A next action with a date closes that loop. Once it’s captured (who has it, when it’s due, what happens if it doesn’t land) your brain can let it go. Because the system is holding it, not you.
Why this is an authority problem, not a time-management one
Every time an EA sends something out and lets it disappear into someone else’s inbox, they’re transferring control of their executive’s calendar, decisions and deadlines to a stranger’s priorities, simply by treating ‘sent’ as the finish line.
Executives notice the opposite far more than they notice the follow-up itself. They notice when nothing falls through or when their EA already knows the answer before they’ve thought to ask for it. That shows who’s running the room.
Handing off control properly
The air traffic model works because control is never released without being explicitly reassigned – with a name, a time, and a trigger attached. In practice, that means the moment an item leaves your hands, three things get decided on the spot, not later:
- Who has it now. And not the department, the
- When it’s due back. Not ‘soon’ – a date and, ideally, a time.
- What happens if it doesn’t land. A second contact, an escalation or a fallback plan.
That’s the difference between ‘waiting on finance’ and ‘CFO’s EA has it, due Thursday 2pm before the board pack closes, escalate to the CFO directly if nothing by Wednesday.’ One is hope. The other is a handoff with a name on it.
Building it in, not bolting it on
None of this works as a one-off discipline remembered under pressure. It has to live inside the same system an EA already uses to triage everything else. Here, a follow-up date is part of the deciding step, captured at the same moment the email is triaged. So, it surfaces automatically in the daily and weekly review rather than depending on memory.
Urgency sets the rhythm – a board paper might need a same-day check while a routine data request might sit comfortably at a week. What matters isn’t the frequency, it’s that nothing is left circling with no-one watching it.
The shift may feel uncomfortable at first because it removes a convenient exit. Instead of ‘I’ve sent it, it’s out of my hands,’ the operating assumption becomes: ‘This is still mine until it’s resolved.’
That single reframe is what separates an EA who processes email from one who runs outcomes. It costs nothing in extra hours, it simply closes the gap where things used to go missing. And closing that gap, item by item, is exactly how an EA becomes someone their executive stops needing to check up on at all.
