The Morning Briefing Workflow

The problem with how most professionals start their day

Most professionals open email, Slack, LinkedIn, and three news tabs simultaneously. An hour later they have read a lot but processed little. They are reactive rather than prepared.

AI makes a different pattern possible: a structured morning briefing that pulls the signal from the noise, in less time than it takes to scroll a social feed.

Building your daily briefing

The goal is a 5-10 minute document that tells you everything you need to know for the day. It has three sections:

Your priorities: What are the 3 most important things you need to accomplish today? This is your input, but AI can help you review yesterday's notes, outstanding items, and calendar to surface what matters most.

External signals: What happened in your industry, with your competitors, and in the world overnight that is relevant to your work? Perplexity is excellent for this: set up saved searches for your key topics and review the overnight results.

Meeting prep: For each meeting on your calendar, a 2-3 line brief: what is the goal, what do you need to bring, what outcome would make it successful?

Automating it

The fully automated version uses n8n or Zapier to pull your calendar, run Perplexity searches on predefined topics, and compile everything into a document emailed to you at 7am. It takes a few hours to set up and runs every day thereafter without input.

The manual version, opening Perplexity and running your standard searches, then pasting your calendar into ChatGPT, takes 10 minutes. Start there and automate when the habit is solid.