One prompt one paste · PDF included
Your Own 8am News Brief
Paste one prompt into Claude and it builds a scheduled task that reads the news on your subjects every morning and hands you a short brief.
You saw mine arrive while I was making coffee. This is how you build the same thing, for whatever subjects you care about.
One paste. It runs every morning after that, and your laptop can be shut.
You need Claude on a paid plan (Pro, Max, Team or Enterprise). Cowork is the mode that goes off and does work on its own: open Claude and select Cowork in the message box. No code, no API key, nothing to install.
1. Paste this into Claude
You do not have to set anything up by hand. Open Claude, select Cowork in the message box, and paste this in. It builds the scheduled task for you.
Set this up as a scheduled task that runs every morning at 8am. Every morning, go through the news from the last 24 hours on these subjects: [AI and new AI tools] [marketing and advertising] [tech industry news] Give me a short brief. For each item: what happened, in one or two plain sentences, and why I should care. Group them by subject. SKIP anything that is: - a funding round or a valuation - a product announcement I cannot actually use yet - a rumour, a leak, or a "sources say" - something I could not act on this week If nothing important happened in a subject, say so in one line rather than padding it out. A short brief is a good brief. Keep the whole thing under 300 words.
Your brief needs web search, or Claude has nothing to read. If the first one comes back empty, or full of things you already knew, it is switched off: click the + at the bottom of the message box and turn on Web search.
Change the three subjects in brackets to whatever you want to stay on top of. Your industry, your competitors, a sport, a market, planning regulations in your city. The prompt does not care what the subjects are, and that is the entire point.
✓ You'll know it worked when Claude confirms the task and it shows up under Scheduled in the left sidebar, with tomorrow's run time on it.
It runs on Anthropic's servers, not your machine. Your laptop can be shut and it still goes.
Where the brief actually appears. Tomorrow morning, open Cowork, click Scheduled in the left sidebar, and open the newest run. That is where your brief is. It does not email you.
2. If you would rather do it by hand
⏭️ Skip this if step 1 worked. It is the same thing, clicked instead of asked.
- Open Claude, select Cowork in the message box, then click Scheduled in the left sidebar.
- Click New task, top right.
- Choose Set up manually.
- Name it. "Morning brief" is fine.
- Paste the prompt into the prompt box, without the first line about scheduling.
- Leave the approval mode alone unless you want to approve every run by hand.
- Set the frequency to daily and pick your time.
- Save.
✓ You'll know it worked when the task appears in your Scheduled list with tomorrow's run time next to it.
3. The one thing that decides whether this works
Tell it what to SKIP, not what to include.
That is the whole difference between a brief you read and a brief you stop opening. Ask an AI for "the important AI news" and it will hand you forty links, because it has no idea what matters to you and it would rather be complete than useful. Which is the exact problem you were trying to escape.
The skip list in the prompt is doing more work than the subjects are. When your brief starts getting bloated, do not add more instructions about what you want. Add another line to the skip list.
Mine ended up with "no funding rounds" on it, because I do not run a fund and I was reading about Series B raises every morning for no reason.
4. Make it yours
Run it for three or four days before you change anything, then fix what actually annoyed you:
| What went wrong | The fix |
|---|---|
| Too long | Lower the word count, or cut a subject |
| Too much noise | Add a line to the skip list |
| Missing things you cared about | Name the subject more specifically. "AI" is too broad, "AI tools for marketers" is not |
| Reads like a press release | Add: "write it like you are telling a friend, not like a newsletter" |
| Wrong time | Change the time in the task's daily setting, or change 8am in the first line of the prompt |
You are allowed to disagree with everything above. The prompt is a starting point, not a template. If your subjects need a different shape, a different length, or a different tone, change it. Nothing here is load bearing except the skip list.
Do this now
- Copy the prompt. Change the three subjects to yours.
- Paste it into Claude. It builds the scheduled task itself.
- Read it tomorrow morning. Change one thing.
That is it. One paste, and you stop scrolling to stay current.
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