Morning Briefing Workflow: Start Your Day Right

The first ten minutes of your morning used to disappear into a fog of app-switching. Open the calendar. Check email. Glance at Slack. Peek at the news. Remind yourself what you said you'd do today. By the time you actually sat down to work, you'd already burned the sharpest cognitive window of the day.

The morning-briefing workflow from ClawFlows is the fix. It assembles everything you'd normally check manually into a single briefing you can read in two minutes, then start working.

Key Takeaways

• morning-briefing is a routine workflow that assembles your calendar, priorities, news, weather, and task list into one briefing.
• It runs from a single command and outputs to your terminal, a file, or a channel of your choice.
• Each section is a separate skill invocation, so you can customize which sources appear.
• The default briefing takes under 30 seconds to generate from real data.
• It's part of the Work & Meetings category in nikilster/clawflows.

The Problem This Workflow Solves

Morning routines are sacred and fragile. If your routine involves five separate app checks, each one is an opportunity to get pulled into something urgent — a Slack thread, an email reply, a news rabbit hole — and lose the morning entirely.

The solution is consolidation. Instead of opening five apps, you run one workflow that queries all five sources, strips them down to the essentials, and presents a clean briefing. You read the briefing. You close it. You start working.

This isn't a new idea — executives have had assistants build morning briefs for decades. What's new is that a workflow can do it for free, in 30 seconds, customized to your exact sources.

What's In a Default Briefing?

The default morning-briefing workflow assembles:

1. Today's calendar events with times and locations
2. Top three priorities from your task list
3. Weather forecast for your location
4. News headlines from your configured sources
5. Any urgent items from your inbox (flagged, starred, or marked important)
6. Yesterday's unfinished items so you don't drop them

Each section is clearly labeled and short. The goal is to fit the entire briefing on one screen so you can read it in under two minutes.

Can I Add or Remove Sections?

Yes. Each section corresponds to a skill invocation in the workflow definition. Remove a section by deleting its step. Add a new one by adding a new skill call. The workflow is open source, and the structure is easy to follow even if you've never written one before.

We walk through authoring changes in Writing Your First Custom ClawFlow.

How It Fits Into a Working Day

I run morning-briefing as step one of my day, before any app gets opened manually. The output hits my terminal. I read it. I decide which of the top three priorities I'm starting with. Then I invoke activate-focus-mode (profiled in Focus Mode: The Workflow That Saved My Week) and start working.

The whole transition from "sitting down" to "actually working" takes about three minutes. Before morning-briefing, it was closer to twenty.

Output Formats

The workflow supports several output destinations out of the box:

• Terminal (default) — briefing prints to stdout
• File — saves to a daily file in your notes directory
• Slack — posts to a channel or DM
• Email — sends to yourself or a list
• Notion or Obsidian — appends to your daily note

Most people start with terminal and graduate to file or daily-note as they build the habit. Having the briefing saved daily creates a nice historical record of what each day looked like.

Pairing With Other Routines

morning-briefing is most useful when it's the opening move of a well-sequenced morning. Here's a routine that many ClawFlows users have settled on:

1. morning-briefing — see the day
2. activate-focus-mode — commit to the first deep work block
3. build-standup (if applicable) — prep your standup update, covered in Automating Standups With Build-Standup
4. Deep work session
5. check-email — batched email processing, covered in Check-Email Workflow: Inbox Zero Automated

That's a morning that runs on rails. Each step takes seconds to invoke and saves minutes (or hours) of drift.

Customization Examples

Some examples of how ClawFlows users have customized morning-briefing:

• A parent added a section for school calendars and pickup times
• A consultant added client-specific priority lists based on active engagements
• A trader added market open prices and overnight news
• A remote worker added timezone info for distributed teammates
• A fitness-focused user added yesterday's workout summary from Apple Health

The workflow is a template, not a prescription. Make it yours.

FAQ

How long does the briefing take to generate?

About 20 to 30 seconds for a default configuration with calendar, tasks, weather, and news. Adding more sources adds time linearly — each skill invocation takes a few seconds.

Does it work with Google Calendar and Outlook?

Yes. The calendar step uses a calendar skill that supports both. You configure your credentials once and the workflow handles the rest.

What news sources does it pull from?

Whatever you configure. The default pulls from a small set of general sources, but you can swap them for RSS feeds, specific publications, or niche sources. Many ClawFlows users point it at Hacker News or their industry-specific feeds.

Can I run it on a schedule?

Yes. You can trigger it with a cron job, a launchd entry on macOS, or a scheduled task on Windows. Some users have it run automatically at 7am so the briefing is waiting when they sit down.

Does it cost anything to run?

The workflow itself is free. If a section calls an API that requires a key (news aggregators sometimes do), you need your own credentials. Most defaults use free sources.

Reclaim Your Mornings

If you've been burning the sharpest part of your day on app-switching, morning-briefing is the cheapest fix you'll find this year. One workflow, 30 seconds, and your mornings run like someone handed you an executive assistant.

Explore all 113 workflows at aiskill.market/workflows or submit your own.

Sources

• nikilster/clawflows on GitHub — source for morning-briefing
• OpenClaw documentation
• 113 Workflows That Run Your Digital Life
• Focus Mode Spotlight
• Anthropic docs