How to build your own morning briefing in 5 minutes

Why every executive needs a morning brief

If you start your mornings checking Slack, email, your calendar, and your to-do list just to figure out what you've missed, you're wasting valuable time.

Think about it: the first hours you're awake are the only ones nobody's interrupting yet. Spend them catching up, and you've already lost your best window.

But don't worry. In the age of AI, you don't have to do any catching up yourself anymore. Without hiring a Chief of Staff, you can now get handed a summary of your day before even opening your calendar.

Here's how to build your own morning brief in three steps. No generic AI slop advice, just the actual workflow I use as CEO and co-founder at Bond.

Step 1: Prompt prompt prompt

A good prompt needs three things: data, context, format.

Here's a tip: agents write better prompts than you can.

So don't start by writing the prompt yourself. Start by describing the output you want, then have the agent write the prompt for you. Give it the format you're after, access to the right data, and enough context on you that it knows what actually matters.

My brief only needs to answer three questions:

• What do I need to know?

• What should I prioritize today?

• Who do I need to urgently reply to?

Step 2: Set a daily trigger

In Zapier, n8n, Bond, whatever you're using: set a trigger, a cadence, and a destination.

Have it pull:

→ Today's calendar events

→ Open or overdue tasks

→ Important emails from the last 24 hours

→ Slack mentions, DMs, or relevant channel activity

Mine runs every weekday at 7:00am. Set-and-forget, so I never think about it again until it lands.

Step 3: Send it somewhere you’ll actually read

Have the automation deliver the output to:

→ Your email

→ A Slack DM

→ iMessage

→ Wherever you already start your day

Do NOT build another dashboard you have to remember to check. The entire point is that it comes to you.

What mine actually looks like

Here's what shows up in Slack every morning:

• My Day — Meetings, demos, and other blocks from my Google Calendar.

• Action items — Everything on my to-do list, automatically added and prioritized by Bond, not just the stuff I remembered to type in.

• Waiting for me — Everyone I need to reply to across Slack and Gmail, prioritized and with context, so I'm not opening five threads to remember why someone's waiting on me.

• What I need to know — Anything happening across my tools that I should be aware of, even if it's not mine to act on yet.

• Suggested action — What Bond thinks I should do next, like a drafted reply or a next step, based on everything above.

The Prompt

Build me a morning brief with 5 sections: Your Day, Action Items, Waiting for You, What You Need to Know, and Suggested Action.

Pull from my Google Calendar, Gmail, and Slack.

Your Day = my meetings and blocks for today.
Action Items = everything on my to-do list, sorted by priority.
Waiting for You = people I need to reply to across Slack and Gmail, with context on each.
What You Need to Know = anything relevant happening across my tools that I'm not directly responsible for, but should be aware of.
Suggested Action = your recommendation for what I should do next, based on everything above.

I'm an executive — prioritize urgency and relevance to my role over volume. Keep it short enough to scan in under 2 minutes.

Thanks for reading!!

Building your own version this week? Steal the structure, skip the manual reconstruction, and if you want the to-do list and the brief to run themselves, try Bond. It's already running mine.