Classify and triage text

“Sort these messages by importance” fails for a simple reason: importance is not defined. Five people rank the same inbox five ways, and so will the model — differently each run. Triage becomes useful when you write the rulebook first: named categories with edges, priority as criteria, and a bucket for whatever does not fit.

The rulebook

1. Categories with boundaries. Name each one and where its edge lies: is a message about a wrong charge “Billing” or “Technical”? Decide — “messages about money go to Billing even if the cause is technical” — and write it down. Boundaries are what make sorting reproducible.
2. Priority as criteria, not adjectives. Not “high importance” but a ranked order: safety risks → money lost today → blocked work → everything else. Criteria can be applied by anyone; adjectives cannot.
3. An unclear bucket. “Needs human review” for messages that fit no category or several. Forcing a guess buries the hard cases where nobody looks again — an explicit bucket keeps them visible.
4. A multi-issue rule. Most real messages contain two problems. Choose: split them, or route by the most severe issue and say so in the output.
5. A fixed structured-output shape. One list per category, one line per message, a five-word reason for its placement.

Why the reason column earns its place

A sorted list you cannot audit is just a guess with formatting. A five-word reason — “wrong charge, money lost” — lets you scan fifty rows in a minute and catch the ones that landed wrong. Triage output should always be checkable at a glance.

A bad example

Ask: “Sort these customer messages by importance and tell me what to do first.”

You get a plausible order, different on every run, with no way to say why row 3 outranks row 4 — and no visibility for the messages that fit nothing.

A better example

Ask: “Sort these messages into Billing, Technical, Shipping, Account access, Other. Priority within each list: safety first, then money lost today, then blocked work. Messages that fit none — or several — go to ‘Needs human review’ with the reason. One line per message, five-word reason. Use only what the messages say.”

Same pile, now a defensible queue: the rules are visible, the unclear cases stayed visible.

Scale it honestly

Triage automates sorting, never accountability. Sample the boundary rows — especially the ones in “Needs human review” and the ones adjacent to category edges — before trusting the whole queue, and expect to tune the rulebook after the first batch. The rules are the product; the sort is just its output.

Practice

Transfer

• Support inboxes: one queue per category, priority criteria written once.
• Feedback and surveys: themes as categories, verbatims kept, unclear ones flagged.
• Personal inbox: two categories — “needs me today”, “needs me eventually” — still beats a vibe.

Next

Next: Spreadsheets: describe, don’t guess — the last work-track skill: turning descriptions into formulas you can actually test.