A good morning brief answers one question in two minutes: what does today need from me? Not "here are your 43 unread emails". Not a motivational quote. Just the meetings, the few messages that actually need you, and one suggestion for the first hour.
An always-on AI assistant can write that brief before you wake up. This post shows the setup I use with Grok Bot: one reusable skill that knows how to write the brief, one scheduled routine that runs it every weekday, and a short rules note that teaches the bot who matters to you. Everything is copy-paste.
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Skill vs routine: why split them
A skill is a recipe: how to do a task, step by step, with an output format and rules. A routine is when to run something: a schedule or an event.
Keeping them separate pays off. The skill works on demand ("what's my day look like?") and on schedule, and when you want to change the format you edit one skill instead of five routines.
Step 1: the Morning brief skill
Paste this whole block, including the --- header, to your bot and say "Save this as a skill."
---
name: Morning brief
description: >-
Use when the user asks for their morning brief, daily brief, or "what's my day look like", or when a scheduled routine asks for one. Combines calendar, inbox and optional topics into one short brief.
---
# Morning brief
Goal: one message the user can read in 2 minutes and know exactly what today needs.
## Steps
1. Read the user's triage rules if they saved them in memory (VIPs, ignore list, categories). If none exist, use the defaults in step 4.
2. Calendar: list today's events in local time. For each meeting note who attends and one line of prep. Flag clashes and meetings without an agenda.
3. Inbox: look at mail received since the last brief (or the last 24 hours; since Friday morning on Mondays). Skip newsletters, receipts, notifications and promotions unless the sender is a VIP.
4. Sort the remaining mail into: **Act today**, **Reply this week**, **FYI**. Max 5 items in Act today; push the rest down.
5. If the user listed topics to follow, add up to 3 headlines from the last 24 hours with links.
6. Write the brief in exactly this order and keep it under 25 lines:
- **Today in one line** (e.g. "4 meetings, heavy afternoon, 1 urgent client reply")
- **Calendar** (time, title, prep)
- **Act today** (sender, subject, why, suggested next step)
- **Reply this week** (one line each)
- **FYI** (count only, plus anything notable)
- **Headlines** (optional)
- **Suggested first hour** (one concrete task)
## Rules
- Never send, archive, delete or label email unless the user explicitly turned that on.
- Never invent meetings, senders or numbers. If a connector is missing, say which one and continue with what you have.
- Use the user's language and time zone.
Three details make this skill work:
- The description is the trigger. It lists the phrases people actually say ("daily brief", "what's my day look like"), so the bot picks the skill even when you don't name it.
- "Max 5 in Act today." Without a cap, everything floats to the top.
- The missing-connector rule. If calendar access breaks, you get "calendar not connected" plus a partial brief, not a confident brief with no meetings in it.
Step 2: teach it who matters (triage rules)
The brief gets much better once the bot knows your VIPs and your noise. Fill this in and paste it with "Remember these as my inbox triage rules."
My inbox triage rules:
VIPs (always Act today if they ask anything): [name / email], [name / email], [domain.com]
Clients or projects that matter this month: [client], [project]
Always ignore (treat as Noise): [sender], [newsletter], [tool notifications]
Read later (keep, but never urgent): [newsletter I like], [industry digest]
My working hours: [08:30-18:00], time zone [Europe/Madrid]
Language for briefs: [English]
Writing style for drafts: [friendly, short, no exclamation marks], sign-off: [Best, Name]
Things that are always urgent: invoices overdue, contract signatures, anything about [payroll / launch / X]
The skill's first step reads these from memory, so you only set them once. Update the "clients that matter this month" line when your month changes.
Step 3: put it on a schedule
The routine is tiny because the skill does the work:
Run @Morning brief for today.
Topics to add headlines for: [TOPIC 1], [TOPIC 2] (remove this line if you don't want headlines).
Send the result to me in this chat.
Paste it and say "Make this a routine with this schedule: weekdays at 7:47" (cron 47 7 * * 1-5). The odd minute is on purpose: routines that all fire at 8:00 compete with each other, and 7:47 lands just before you sit down.
You can see the routine afterwards in the bot's info pane: click the bot's name in the chat header, or press Cmd+Shift+I.
What a good brief looks like
Show your bot the target. This example ships with the pack and works well as a reference:
Today in one line: 3 meetings, free after 15:00, 1 client waiting on a quote.
Calendar
- 09:30 Weekly sync (team). Prep: bring the launch date question.
- 11:00 Intro call with Ana at Northwind. Prep: read her last email about volumes.
- 14:00 Dentist (personal).
Act today
- Ana (Northwind), "Quote for Q1": waiting since yesterday. Next step: send the price range.
- Accounting, "Invoice 0412 overdue": confirm payment date.
Reply this week
- Marco: asks for feedback on the deck.
- Event organiser: speaker form.
FYI: 14 newsletters, 6 notifications. Nothing unusual.
Suggested first hour: finish and send the Northwind quote.
Notice what's missing: no full email quotes, no list of every newsletter, no "Good morning! ☀ï¸". It's 15 lines you can read on your phone.
Optional: a VIP sweep during the day
Once the morning brief is reliable, an hourly VIP check catches the few messages that can't wait until tomorrow:
Check my email for messages received in the last 65 minutes from anyone on my VIP list (saved in your memory). For each, send one line: sender, subject, what they need. Never reply.
Send the result to me in this chat. If there are none, send nothing.
Schedule: hourly at :27, weekdays 9-18 (27 9-18 * * 1-5). The 65-minute window overlaps the hourly run by 5 minutes, so nothing slips between checks. And "send nothing" means most hours you hear nothing at all.
The safety rule I wouldn't remove
Every piece above drafts, but never sends, archives, deletes or unsubscribes. An assistant reading your inbox will sometimes misjudge urgency. When the worst outcome is a slightly wrong summary, that's fine. When the worst outcome is an email sent in your name, it isn't. If you ever loosen this, do it for one narrow action at a time, after watching the bot for a couple of weeks.
The inbox-triage skill in the pack also flags likely phishing: if an email asks you to click, pay, share a code or log in and the sender looks unusual, it says so instead of summarizing it as a normal request.
Week one checklist
- Save the skill. Ask "what's my day look like?" and check the output against your real calendar.
- Paste your triage rules.
- Add the 7:47 routine.
- For five days, fix the skill whenever the brief is wrong, not just that day's brief. ("Update the Morning brief skill: put personal events last.")
- After a week, add the VIP sweep if you want it.
Want the full pack?
The skill and routine above are enough to start. If you'd rather not assemble the rest yourself, the Morning Brief & Inbox Triage Pack ($12) has 3 skills (Morning brief, Inbox triage, Reply drafter), 6 routines (morning brief, midday sweep, end-of-day close, Monday week-ahead, VIP sweep, Friday unsubscribe list), the triage-rules template, the example brief, 12 one-off email prompts and a 15-minute setup checklist.
If you just want to try scheduled routines first, the free 10-routine starter is a good place to begin.
Both are unofficial, community-made kits: plain text you paste into your own bot. Nothing in them runs code or connects to your accounts by itself.
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