AI Daily Digests

AI daily digests or to-do lists are the most obviously useful LLM feature almost nobody actually has or talks about. I've been getting one every weekday morning for some time now and it's one of the most helpful things Claude does for me.

Agentic LLMs like Claude Cowork are especially useful for practical items like a daily digest, particularly if they can look through relevant news sources and your emails. These digests are very personal, so a general pre-built skill or tool won't help you much, and building one yourself takes time and effort. One other bottleneck is that Outlook doesn't let Claude (or any other LLM) create emails or calendar events. Getting the digest onto your screen automatically each morning is tricky.

I realised there are three workarounds that work, and wrote a guide anyone - whatever work you do - can use. You attach the guide (MD file) to a Claude Cowork chat, ask Claude to follow it, and answer its questions.

Claude then:

(a) builds you a personalised daily-digest skill based on your news sources, emails, Teams messages, whatever you want; and

(b) sets up a scheduled task so the digest lands on your screen automatically (in Outlook or your browser) every morning.

I use it every day, and find it really helpful to have a "Claude Cowork powered" to-do list in my calendar. The guide uses the structure and mechanics of my own (heavily tested) daily digest skill, so hallucination, 'drifting' and missing-context risk is low.