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Bruno Ashford @brunoashfordSubscribeModule 10 · Lesson 10.5 · 13 min
The Owner's Morning Brief
Build a daily automatic summary of what needs your attention: emails, sales, cash and pending tasks, ready before you start work.
Use ← → to move. The marker highlights text and the pencil draws on the slide; navigation locks while you annotate. Undo removes the last mark, Esc exits.
1Decide what goes in the brief
Keep it to one screen. A good default: yesterday's numbers (sales, leads, cash), anything overdue, emails that need you personally, today's meetings with context, and the top three priorities. Everything else waits.
Help me design my morning brief. Ask me what I need to know each morning to run the business, then write a one-page prompt file at prompts/morning-brief.md. Sections: yesterday in numbers, risks and overdue items, messages that need me personally, today's meetings with one line of context each, and my top three priorities. Maximum 300 words of output.2Connect the sources
Start with files you already export (CRM, aging report, ops check). Add your email and calendar through a connector or MCP server from Module 6 when you are ready. For unattended runs, allow only the read tools of each connector; check the exact tool names with /mcp.
/mcp3Test the brief headless
Run it by hand exactly as the scheduler will, and read the result critically. If a section is vague, fix the prompt file, not the output.
claude -p "$(cat prompts/morning-brief.md)" --permission-mode dontAsk --allowedTools "Read" > "briefs/brief-$(date +%F).md"4Schedule it for weekdays
Use the option you chose in lesson 10.1. On a Mac, the recipes file has a launchd example set to 6:45am on weekdays. On Windows, create a task with /sc weekly and the five weekdays. A cloud routine works too if your sources are connectors.
schtasks /create /tn "AI Morning Brief" /tr "powershell.exe -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File C:\ai\morning-brief.ps1" /sc weekly /d MON,TUE,WED,THU,FRI /st 06:455Run it for seven days and log the results
Each day, add one line to the Routine Run Log: did it run, how long you saved, was anything wrong or missing. At the end of the week, ask Claude to review the log and the briefs and suggest improvements.
Read logs/routine-run-log.csv and the last seven files in briefs/. Tell me: how many runs succeeded, total minutes saved, which sections I never used, and three changes to prompts/morning-brief.md that would make it more useful.Most owners start the day by opening email and reacting to whoever shouted loudest overnight. By 10am the important thing has been pushed aside by the urgent thing. The morning brief flips that: before you open anything, one page tells you what changed, what is at risk and the three things only you can do today.
This lesson puts together everything from the module. A prompt file, a headless run with tight permissions, a schedule, a hook that logs it, and a run log that proves its value. After seven days you will not want to start a day without it.
Key points
- Start the day on your priorities, not on your inbox.
- One screen, five sections, three priorities.
- Unattended runs get read-only access to email and calendar.
- Seven days of logs tell you what to keep and what to cut.
Avoid
- Building a brief so long you stop reading it by day three.
- Giving the brief permission to send or reply to emails.
- Skipping the run log, then having no proof it saved time.
- Never updating the prompt after the first week.
The managing partner of a small US family law firm used to spend the first 50 minutes of each day in her inbox and case management system. Her brief now arrives at 6:45am: new enquiries overnight, filings due in the next five days, unbilled time over two weeks old, and client emails flagged as upset. In the first week it surfaced a filing deadline that had been entered in the wrong matter. Her morning review now takes about 12 minutes, and she starts the day on the work only she can do.