Build a morning brief with Claude Cowork.

Before you set anything up, name what you actually want to know at 6am. The brief is only useful if it answers the questions you would otherwise open four apps to check.

A working starting set, in the order most people want it:

• The one thing that matters most today, up top
• Your meetings, in order, with times
• The email that actually needs a reply, not the newsletters
• Anything due today from your task list
• Optional: weather, or a headline or two from a topic you follow
• A small lesson at the end, on something you want to learn, one piece a day

Keep the day part short. The point of a brief is that you read all of it. If it grows into a wall of text, you will start skimming, and then it is just another feed. The lesson is the one piece that is not about today, and I will come back to it in Step 3.

Cowork can only pull from what it is allowed to see. So before the brief can include your calendar, you connect your calendar. Same for email and anything else.

1. Open Cowork settings and find Connectors. This is the list of apps Cowork can read from.
2. Connect the ones your brief needs. For the starting set above, that is your calendar and your email. Sign in when it asks, and approve read access.
3. Add more only when you want them. A task app, a notes app, a news source. Start with two and grow later.

This is the whole thing. You write one set of instructions for what the brief should contain and how long it should be, and Cowork follows it every morning.

Paste this into Cowork, then change the bracketed parts to match what you connected:

Every morning, write me one short brief for the day. Pull from my connected [calendar and email].

- Start with today's date and the single most important thing on it.
- List my meetings in time order. Flag any that have no agenda or no clear purpose.
- Show emails from the last 24 hours that actually need a reply from me, grouped by sender. Skip newsletters, receipts, and notifications.
- List anything due today from [my task list].
- End with one short lesson, about 120 words, on [a topic I want to learn]. Teach it in a sensible order, one small piece per day, and pick up each morning where yesterday left off, so it builds into the whole topic over a few weeks.
- Keep the day part (everything above the lesson) under 200 words. No greeting, no sign-off, no preamble.
- If a section has nothing in it, leave it out entirely. Always keep the lesson.

The two rules doing the real work are the word limit and "leave empty sections out." Without them, a brief on a quiet day still fills a screen and trains you to ignore it.

The lesson at the end is the part I would not skip. Anything you want to learn, you do not have to sit down for it. You hand the topic to the brief, it splits it into small daily pieces, and a few minutes a morning adds up to the whole thing over a few weeks. Swap the topic whenever you finish one.

Right now the prompt only runs when you ask. To make it a morning brief, you tell Cowork to run it on its own, on a schedule.

1. Tell Cowork when to run it. In the same chat, say "run this every morning at 6am" or whatever time you actually get up. It sets up a scheduled task from the prompt you just wrote.
2. Pick a time that beats your day, not your alarm. Early enough that the brief is waiting for you, not so early it misses an email that came in overnight. Most people land around when they have their first coffee.
3. Confirm it is saved. Cowork will tell you the task is scheduled. From then on it runs without you.

That is the part that turns a one-time prompt into something that shows up on its own. You did the thinking once, in Step 3, and the schedule reuses it every day.

The brief is written in your Cowork space, which lives on your laptop. So by default it waits there for you to open. That is fine at a desk, but most mornings you want it in your hand without opening the laptop at all. Two ways to do that.

Either way you read the whole thing on your phone, lesson and all, and the laptop stays shut on the desk. It still has to be awake with the Claude app open, the same as Step 4. It is doing the work and sending it to you, even though you read it somewhere else.

The first version will be close, not perfect. That is expected. You read a few real briefs, notice what is missing or what you skip past, and adjust.

The usual fixes, and how to ask for each:

• Too long: "cut it to 120 words and drop the weather"
• Missing something: "also include anything I starred in email yesterday"
• Too much noise: "only show meetings where I am the organizer or a required guest"
• Wrong order: "put what is due today above my meetings"

You are editing the same instructions from Step 3, in plain language. No settings to dig through. After a week it will fit your morning, and then you leave it alone.

Skip this if the morning brief is all you wanted. Once it works, the same pattern covers more than mornings.

1. An end-of-day version. A short wind-down that lists what is still open and what tomorrow looks like. Same idea, scheduled for the evening.
2. A "only if something changed" version. Tell it to message you during the day only when a specific thing happens, like a meeting getting moved, instead of on a fixed clock.
3. A weekly version. A Sunday-night brief that looks at the whole week ahead instead of one day.