In April I wrote two scheduled tasks for Claude’s desktop app, a morning brief for my calendar and a nightly digest for my inbox, and only the digest still runs. The morning brief is switched off and hasn’t run since May 21. Both are short instructions in plain language that use the Google connectors I already had, so there’s no code to look after.
The morning brief
Early on weekday mornings the brief pulled my calendar for today and tomorrow, in Central time, and worked through each meeting. It sorted internal from external by email domain, searched Gmail for recent threads with the attendees, flagged conflicts, and noted the company and LinkedIn profile of anyone from outside. It also checked for documents shared around the meeting and for unsent drafts. The instruction ends by asking for “concise briefing with actionable context for each meeting,” and that one paragraph was the whole spec.
The nightly digest
The digest reads my work inbox. Every night it opens a log of the message IDs it has already summarized and only looks at mail that isn’t in it, so nothing turns up in two digests. For each new message it gives me the sender, the subject, a sentence or two of summary, any action items and an urgency flag.
It also searches for Google Drive share notifications. For each shared document it looks up the real link in Drive, since the link in the notification email is a tracking redirect, and adds the document to a pending list in a tracker file with its title, who shared it and when.
Then comes the step I care about most. It sits under a heading in capitals and opens with “This is the most important part.” The notification repeats the entire pending list every night, each document with who shared it and how many days it’s been waiting, and it ends by asking me to reply with the names of anything I’ve read so it can mark them off. The instruction says outright that writing to the file and moving on doesn’t count.
When a night goes wrong
Because the log tracks message IDs and a failed run writes down the window it missed, a bad night repairs itself. One night in late October the Gmail search failed on every attempt through about ten minutes of retries, so the run marked itself incomplete in the log, recorded no message IDs, and wrote down the window the next run should cover, and the following night’s digest covered both days. The tracker now also notes when a pending document has been edited since it was shared and whether I’ve ever opened it.
Still running
The digest still runs every night, and its log and tracker are current as of this week. Its whole instruction is short enough to paste into a message, and I’ll send it to anyone who wants to adapt it for their own inbox.