Talo Guide
The Monday inbox review, turned into a board
How to ask Talo to turn an email inbox into board tasks without duplicating the same debt twice, and repeat it every Monday with an automation.
About the screenshots in this guide
Every screenshot in this English guide is a real capture of Talo, currently shown with the Spanish interface (the English interface is on its way). Menus, buttons and labels in the pictures are in Spanish; the surrounding text describes what each one does in English.
You come in on Monday with an inbox full of weekend emails: an overdue invoice, a bounced direct debit, a delivery with no date, a client who needs a quote before a meeting, and almost always some supplier sending two or three reminders about the same invoice. Turning that into tasks by hand, one at a time, is tedious and easy to duplicate. You can ask Talo to do it for you, and automate it to repeat every Monday.
Steps
- If your Talo profile has no mail account connected, or if you just want to
try the recipe first, export the pending emails into a single Markdown file in the project (one block per email, with sender, date, and subject) and treat it as that Monday's inbox.
- In the project's
TALO.md, write down the duplicate rule: "if several
emails from the same sender could be the same debt or request counted twice, don't create one task per email: group them into a single task marked as a possible duplicate, pending confirmation". Also add that newsletters and advertising don't generate tasks.
- In the project's Tasks tab, create a new board with "Ask Talo" and mark the
inbox file as the source document. Pick the engine and create: Talo reads the file and proposes one card per pending topic.
- Review the proposal before creating the board. Check in particular that
emails from the same supplier about what looks like the same invoice end up in a single card marked as a possible duplicate, not spread across several.
- Once the board exists, ask in a project conversation for a scheduled task
that repeats the review every Monday: "create a scheduled task that runs Mondays at 9:00, with the instruction to triage the inbox into board tasks without duplicating repeated debts". The assistant creates it paused: it does not activate itself.
- Go to Scheduled tasks, open the automation, and click "Activate". Only then
is it scheduled for the coming Mondays; until you activate it, it never runs.
Tip
This recipe was actually tested with twelve synthetic emails, including three from the same supplier about the same invoice with amounts that didn't quite match. Talo turned them into seven cards, not twelve: it grouped the supplier's three emails into a single "possible duplicate" card with the amount difference explained, and dropped the newsletter and the advertising email without creating a task for either. It also noticed on its own that two emails gave different dates for the same committee meeting and left that as a sub-task to clarify, instead of picking a date at random. Full detail in docs/evidence/casos-de-uso-2026-10-17/ inside the repository.
"Ask Talo" only creates new boards: if the project already has one, this path won't add cards to an existing board, so this recipe fits best for a first inbox pass or a dedicated admin project. And remember that no automation activates itself: the first time, you always activate it.