The Morning Email Brief
Wake up to "what needs me," not your inbox.
Now that Cowork can read your email, this is the workflow you set up first. A scheduled task that runs every morning before you wake up, reads everything that came in overnight, filters out the noise, and surfaces just the handful of emails that actually need you. The brief shows up as a block on your Family Dashboard. You open the dashboard with your coffee. You see what matters. You decide what to handle.
What this replaces.
The 8-minute morning scroll through your inbox where you mostly close marketing emails, half-read a couple of school updates, and forget to reply to the one that actually mattered. That whole loop becomes: open dashboard, see five emails ranked and tagged, handle the three that need you.
Set up the scheduled task.
Open Family Manager. Start a new chat. Tell Cowork what you want:
Cowork sets up the scheduled task and shows you the details. If anything's off — time, day frequency, how aggressively to filter marketing — just tell Cowork what to change.
The awake-and-running caveat (again).
Scheduled tasks need your computer awake and Claude Desktop running at the scheduled time. For a 6:30am brief, that means either you're up by 6:30 with your laptop open, or you're using Amphetamine / Caffeine / PowerToys Awake to keep the computer from sleeping overnight. Without one of those, the brief won't run on a closed laptop.
Add the brief to your dashboard.
The scheduled task saves the brief as a file. The dashboard block reads from that file. We added the dashboard in Build Your Family Dashboard — now we tell Cowork to add a new block to it.
Cowork updates the dashboard artifact. Open it and confirm the block is there. Right now it'll either be empty (no brief has run yet) or show a placeholder. Tomorrow morning's brief will populate it.
What this looks like in practice.
Tomorrow morning, sometime between 6:30am and whenever you open your laptop, the brief runs. The next time you open your dashboard, the email block has 5 to 10 entries, each tagged. The URGENT ones (if any) are at the top. The REPLY ones are next. FYIs are at the bottom. If you only have time to handle one thing this morning, you handle the URGENT. If you have time for more, you work down the list.
Tune it over the first week.
The first few days, the brief will be roughly right but not exactly right. Cowork is guessing about what "needs your attention" means for you. The fix is to tell it what to do differently each time you notice something off.
Common tuning moves
- "Marketing emails from [domain] are still slipping through. Always exclude them."
- "This morning's brief tagged the school newsletter as REPLY. It should be FYI — school newsletters never need a response."
- "The brief is too long. Cap it at 5 emails — show me the top 5 by urgency only."
- "Anything from my kid's teacher should always be flagged URGENT, even if it sounds routine."
- "Don't include emails I've already replied to. Skip threads where my most recent message was the last one."
- "Tomorrow morning, also include anything from the last 48 hours that I haven't replied to yet — sometimes I miss things on the weekend."
Each adjustment becomes part of how Cowork runs the brief going forward. After a week of these, the brief is calibrated to you.
What the brief contains (and doesn't).
The brief file (current-email-brief.md) only holds the sender, subject, and your one-line summary — not the full email bodies. So if you ever share your dashboard with family (via Netlify or Documents by Readdle, from the dashboard lesson), the deployed view shows the brief without exposing full email contents. The actual emails stay where they are, in your inbox.
Next: Drafting Replies.
The brief tells you which emails need a reply. The next lesson sets up the workflow for actually replying — telling Cowork to draft responses for you, iterating on tone and length, and reviewing before anything goes out.
Continue to Drafting Replies →