Why Your Email Assistant Should Track Your Commitments

Here's a scenario that happens to every professional, every week:

You're in an email thread with a client. Somewhere in message #4, you write: "I'll have the revised proposal over to you by Friday." You mean it when you type it. But Friday comes, you've been buried in 200 other emails, and that promise? Gone. Forgotten. Until Monday, when the client follows up and you feel that sinking feeling.

This isn't a character flaw. It's an information management problem. And it's one that AI can now solve.

The Hidden Cost of Broken Promises

Every email thread contains implicit and explicit commitments:

• "I'll send you the report by EOD" — deadline commitment
• "Can you review this and get back to me?" — action item for you
• "Let's circle back on this next week" — follow-up commitment
• "I'll loop in my colleague" — promise to connect

Research from Harvard Business Review shows that professionals break an average of 3-5 email commitments per week — not out of malice, but because there's simply no system to track them. These broken micro-commitments erode trust over time. People stop relying on you. Opportunities quietly disappear.

Why Traditional Tools Fall Short

You might think: "I have a to-do list for that." But here's the problem:

Manual extraction doesn't scale. You'd need to read every email carefully, identify every commitment, and manually enter it somewhere. With 100+ emails a day, that's another hour of work — to solve a problem created by too much work.

Calendar reminders miss the context. You can set a reminder for Friday, but when it pops up, do you remember which proposal, for which client, from which thread? Context is everything.

Follow-up tools only track what you send. Most email tracking tools tell you if someone opened your email. They don't tell you about the promise buried in paragraph three of their reply to you.

How AI Changes Everything

Modern AI can read through your email threads and automatically extract commitments — both ones you've made and ones others have made to you. Here's what that looks like in practice:

Automatic Extraction

IRIS, the AI assistant in Tame My Inbox, scans your emails and identifies language patterns that indicate commitments:

• "I'll send you..." → You owe someone something
• "Can you please..." → Someone is asking you to do something
• "By Friday..." → There's a deadline
• "Let me check and get back to you" → Follow-up needed

Two-Way Tracking

Commitments aren't one-directional. IRIS tracks:

• What you owe others — promises you've made that need fulfilling
• What others owe you — things people said they'd do that you're waiting on

This is incredibly powerful for follow-ups. Instead of guessing "did Sarah ever send that contract?", you can check your commitments dashboard and see it listed with the date it was promised.

Intelligent Nudges

When a commitment is approaching its deadline — or past due — you get a gentle nudge. Not a generic reminder, but one with full context: who made the commitment, in which email thread, and what was promised.

Real Examples

Here are actual commitments IRIS might extract from a typical day:

Now imagine having this view across your entire email history. Nothing falls through the cracks. You follow up proactively instead of reactively. You build a reputation as someone who always delivers.

The Productivity Multiplier

Commitment tracking isn't just about preventing embarrassment. It's a productivity multiplier:

1. You plan better — knowing exactly what's on your plate from email alone
2. You respond faster — because you know what's due and what's waiting
3. You build trust — consistently following through builds your professional reputation
4. You stress less — no more 2 AM "did I forget something?" anxiety

Getting Started

If you're tired of promises slipping through the cracks, commitment tracking is the feature you didn't know you needed. It turns your chaotic email threads into an organized system of accountability.

Start tracking commitments automatically. Try Tame My Inbox free.