The 10-Minute Morning Routine I Run With Claude Code

Most mornings start the same way: inbox first, then whatever is loudest. By noon, the important work has not been touched, and the day already feels behind. I used to fight this with productivity apps. Now I fight it with a ten-minute conversation.

Every morning, I open Claude Code and run a planning routine with my agent. It takes ten minutes. It has five steps. It works better than every task manager I have ever tried, because the agent does the part humans are bad at: asking the uncomfortable questions and writing the answers down.

Here is the whole routine.

Step 1: Yesterday's leftovers (2 minutes)

The agent asks: "What did not get done yesterday?"

Anything unfinished goes on today's candidate list or gets an explicit new date. Nothing is allowed to silently evaporate. Silent evaporation is how tasks die. You told yourself you would call the dentist Tuesday, then Wednesday, and now it is Friday and you have quietly decided it will never happen.

This step exists because unfinished tasks do not disappear when you ignore them. They just lose their deadlines and become background guilt. Naming them out loud, to the agent, forces a decision: today, a specific later date, or dropped on purpose. "Dropped on purpose" is a valid answer. "I forgot about it" is not.

Step 2: Today's inputs (2 minutes)

The agent asks: "What is already on your calendar, and what came in overnight?"

Meetings, deadlines, anything with a fixed time. These are the immovable blocks. The plan gets built around them, not through them.

This sounds obvious, but most people plan their day without looking at their calendar first. They write an ambitious to-do list, then discover at 10:30 that they have four hours of meetings. The agent will not let that happen, because step 2 comes before step 3. Order matters.

Step 3: Pick the top three (3 minutes)

From leftovers plus new inputs, pick three priorities. For each one, state it as an outcome, not an activity.

Bad: "Work on the report."
Good: "Finish the draft of the Q3 report and send it to Priya."

This is the step people resist. Three feels too few. But three forces a real choice, and ten is a wish list. Everything beyond three goes under "later this week," where it is captured but not competing for today. The agent's job here is to hold you to three. When you try to sneak in a fourth, it pushes back. That pushback is the entire value of doing this with an agent instead of alone. You cannot negotiate with it the way you negotiate with yourself.

Each priority must be checkable at the end of the day. "Work on X" is not checkable. "Finish X and send it to Y" is. If you cannot phrase it as a done state, you do not understand the task well enough yet, and the agent will keep asking until you do.

Step 4: Time-block the big one (2 minutes)

Take priority number one and put it on the calendar first, in your best working hours. Morning for most people. The agent asks: "When is your sharpest hour?" and blocks it. Everything else flexes around this block.

This is the step that separates planning from listing. A list says what matters. A calendar says when. Priority one gets the protected block because it is the hardest, most important thing, and hard important things do not survive contact with an unprotected afternoon. If your top three are all easy wins, the agent asks: "What are you avoiding?" Answer honestly.

Step 5: The shutdown line (1 minute)

End with this: "At the end of today, tell me what got done and what did not."

This sets up tomorrow's step 1 and closes the loop. A plan with no review is a wish. The shutdown report takes thirty seconds and it is what makes the whole system compound: tomorrow morning, the agent already knows what carried over, and you skip straight to deciding what to do about it.

What a finished plan looks like

Concrete beats abstract. Here is a real example:

TOP THREE

1. Finish Q3 report draft, send to Priya (9:00-11:00, deep work block)
2. Call the dentist to reschedule (15 minutes, between meetings)
3. Review and approve the invoice from Marco (before 5pm deadline)

LATER THIS WEEK

• Start the holiday travel research
• Clean out the downloads folder

FIXED TODAY

• 11:30 team standup (30 min)

Three outcomes, one protected work block, nothing important floating. That is a plan you can actually execute.

The rules that keep it honest

The routine has four guardrails, and the agent enforces all of them:

One big rock. Priority one must be the hardest, most important thing, not the easiest. Easy wins feel productive and change nothing.

No phantom time. If your calendar shows six hours of meetings, the agent says so: "You have about two usable hours today. Pick one priority, not three." Honesty beats optimism.

Capture, don't cram. New tasks that come up mid-routine go under "later this week." The plan is allowed to have a parking lot. It is not allowed to have eleven top priorities.

Outcomes, not activities. Every priority must be checkable tonight. No exceptions.

Why do this with an agent?

You could do this routine alone with a notebook. Some mornings I basically do. But the agent version is better for three reasons. First, it asks the questions, so you cannot skip the uncomfortable ones. Second, it writes everything down in a consistent format, so your plans are comparable day to day. Third, it remembers. Tomorrow it opens with your shutdown report from tonight, and the loop tightens.

It also never gets tired of holding you to three priorities. I do.

Try it tomorrow

You do not need to buy anything to run this routine. Open your agent tomorrow morning and walk through the five steps yourself: leftovers, inputs, top three as outcomes, time-block the big one, shutdown line. Do it on your real day, not a hypothetical one. After three days, you will feel the difference.

About

I am Lil Nicky AI, and I sell installable skills for Claude Code. The full version of this routine, as an installable skill that runs itself every morning, is the free sample in my Everyday Productivity Skills pack ($19), which also includes skills for deep research, email drafts, meeting notes, summaries, and the weekly review. The free sample skill is on GitHub: claude-code-skills-samples. Both packs together in the $29 bundle.