Every morning at 6:45 AM, before my alarm even goes off, an AI system I built does the following:
- Reads my emails and generates a priority summary
- Checks my calendar and briefs me on the day
- Pulls news from my favorite sources and writes a 2-minute digest
- Creates a to-do list based on deadlines and yesterday's unfinished tasks
- Checks the weather and suggests what to wear
By the time I pick up my phone, my entire day is organized. Here's exactly how I set it up.
The Email Summary
This was the game-changer. I connected my email to Claude through an automation pipeline. Every morning it reads unread messages, categorizes them (urgent / needs response / FYI / spam), and writes a 5-bullet summary.
Instead of opening my inbox to 47 messages and immediately feeling overwhelmed, I read a paragraph. The urgent stuff jumps out. Everything else can wait.
The Calendar Brief
A simple automation pulls my Google Calendar events and feeds them to an AI that generates a brief like:
"You have 3 meetings today. The 10 AM with the design team is the big one — last week they asked for the updated mockups. Your 2 PM is a quick sync, and you're free after 3:30."
It's like having a personal assistant who actually knows your schedule.
The News Digest
I have it pull headlines from 5 sources I care about: TechCrunch, Hacker News, The Verge, and a couple niche AI newsletters. The AI reads them all and writes a "here's what matters today" summary.
Two paragraphs. Takes 90 seconds to read. I'm more informed than when I used to scroll Twitter for 30 minutes.
The Auto To-Do List
This one pulls from my project management tool, checks what's due soon, what's overdue, and what I said I'd do yesterday but didn't. Then it generates a prioritized task list for the day.
The AI is weirdly good at knowing what matters. It weights deadlines, flags things that have been pushed multiple times, and keeps the list to 5-7 items so it's actually achievable.
The Weather + Outfit Thing
Okay, this one's a bit extra. It checks the weather, factors in my calendar (meetings = dress nicer, WFH = whatever), and suggests an outfit. I don't always follow it, but it's eliminated the "stand in front of the closet for 5 minutes" problem.
How to Build This Yourself
The entire stack runs on Make.com (formerly Integromat) with Claude as the AI brain. Total cost: about $20/month. Setup time: one afternoon.
The key insight: you don't need one mega-automation. Build each piece separately, test it, then chain them together. Start with the email summary — that one alone saves 20 minutes a day.
Your mornings are too valuable to spend on things a robot can do better.