Daily Briefing

Daily Briefing

One scannable briefing answering four questions: what landed in my inbox, who am I waiting on, what do I still owe people, and what does today look like. Replace "I'll scroll through my inbox for 20 minutes" with a 60-second read.

This adapts to whichever mail and calendar tools are connected. The steps below use Outlook/Microsoft 365 as the worked example, because its quirks were found the hard way in live use and are worth keeping as documented gotchas. On Gmail or Google Workspace, substitute the equivalent calls (search_gmail_messages / Gmail search operators, and your connected calendar search tool) and keep the same lookback, sort, and render logic.

Inputs

• Mail lookback: 3 days by default, or lookback_days from their config if one exists. Calendar: today plus the next business day, extended through Monday on a Friday.
• The current user's own mailbox. Do not pass a delegate/shared-mailbox parameter unless they name a delegate.
• Honor any window they state instead ("past week", "since Monday", "today").
• Read about-me.md from the connected workspace folder if one exists. Use it for VIP names, accounts, and role. If there is no such file, skip it and say nothing; most people will not have one.

Step 1: Pull the sources in parallel

Make these calls in one turn.

1. Received — Outlook: outlook_email_search, folderName: "Inbox", afterDateTime: "<lookback> days ago", limit: 25. Gmail: search the inbox with the equivalent date-bounded query.
2. Sent awaiting reply — Outlook: outlook_email_search, sender: <their address>, afterDateTime: "<lookback> days ago", limit: 25. Gmail: search from:<their address> over the same window.
3. Calendar — Outlook: outlook_calendar_search, query: "*", afterDateTime: "today", beforeDateTime: "in 2 days", limit: 50. Gmail / Google Workspace: the connected calendar tool's event list over the same window.
4. Commitments — if a meeting-commitments store exists, run its list --status open. This is a real ledger of what they promised, and it beats inferring obligations from sent mail. If there is no store, skip it; do not offer to set one up mid-briefing. See meeting-commitments.

Two hard-won Outlook rules: do not use folderName: "Sent Items", because that lookup returns NOT_FOUND in live use even when the folder plainly exists; the sender: filter is reliable. And do not raise limit above 25 to catch a busy inbox, which has overflowed the token budget. Make a second targeted pull instead, filtered to unread or to VIP senders. (These two are Outlook-specific; Gmail's search does not have the same failure modes, but keep the same 25-item cap for token budget reasons.)

Step 2: Find sent mail with no reply

For each sent item, search the inbox for messages from that recipient after the sent timestamp, matching subject with Re: and Fwd: stripped. Nothing found means awaiting reply.

Skip items where they were the only recipient, and anything whose reply would be automated: noreply@, calendar-server@, unsubscribe confirmations. When in doubt, include it. One extra thread beats one missed one.

Step 3: Sort into three buckets

Urgent, needs action today

• An explicit deadline today or past due.
• Escalations, or anything from leadership carrying urgency.
• Prep for a meeting in the next 24 hours with no prep visible.
• A thread they started, sitting 2+ business days, that is blocking them.
• Customer- or client-facing trouble: bounces, complaints, churn signals.
• A commitment from the ledger that is overdue or promised to someone external.

Needs Reply, owed but not on fire

• Direct questions to them, unanswered.
• Routine sent follow-ups awaiting a reply.
• Scheduling, intros, review requests.
• CCs that implicitly ask for input.
• Open commitments with a stated deadline still ahead.

FYI

• Newsletters, digests, automated mail.
• CCs where someone else owns the action.
• Announcements and confirmations.
• Events they are only attending, with no prep.

Demote noise willingly. A newsletter with a clickbait subject is still a newsletter.

Step 4: Render

# Daily Briefing — [Day, Date]

[One sentence: "3 urgent, 7 awaiting your reply, light calendar today."]

## Urgent — Action Today
- **[Subject or topic]** — [Who] — [Why it's urgent, what's needed]

## Needs Reply
### Waiting on you
- **[Subject]** — [Sender] — [What they're asking]
### Sent, no reply yet
- **[Subject]** — to [Recipient], sent [N days ago] — [What you asked]
### You promised
- **[Commitment]** — to [Who], from [Meeting], [N days ago]

## FYI
- [One line each. Group newsletters together.]

## Calendar
### Today
- [Time] — [Event] — [Prep note if any]
### Tomorrow (or Monday)
- [Time] — [Event] — [Prep note if any]

## First moves
1. [Highest-impact thing to do in the next hour]
2. [Next]
3. [Third, if there is a clear one]

One line of "why this matters" per item, never a summary of the email. They will click through if they need more.

Running as a scheduled task: write to the path in their config, defaulting to <workspace>/briefings/YYYY-MM-DD.md, and render in chat as well.

Optional: region or account scoping

Only if about-me.md states a region or account coverage. When it does, demote out-of-scope items to FYI, never drop them: a briefing that silently deletes mail teaches people not to trust it, and account naming is ambiguous enough (a subsidiary versus its parent company) that the filter will be wrong sometimes. Treat the account root as always in scope.

Without a stated coverage in about-me.md, do not filter by region at all.

Guardrails

• Never invent a deadline: a message that says "soon" does not mean Thursday.
• No email bodies verbatim: quote one only when they ask for it.
• Surface, do not act: no auto-reply, no auto-schedule, no auto-archive. If they then ask for a draft or a task, confirm before sending or creating.
• Say when a section is empty: report the gap rather than padding it.
• This is for them only: do not export senders or thread contents to files, chat channels, or an artifact unless asked. Health, compensation, and performance items never leave the chat.

Do not use this skill for

• Prep for one specific upcoming meeting, with attendee research and talking points → briefing-prep
• Drafting a reply to a specific email → the email-draft skill (org-content)
• Tracking what they promised in meetings → meeting-commitments
• A leadership team agenda for the week → weekly-agenda
• Summarizing a Slack channel → slack-summary