Daily Briefing from Email and Calendar

This lesson connects Claude Code to your real email and calendar, then builds one skill that reads both and hands you a single, structured briefing: today's schedule, what to know before each meeting, and anything urgent sitting in your inbox. Where Lesson 4.3 built a three-skill plugin, this one shows the other end of the range — sometimes one well-built skill is the whole job.

Most mornings start with opening two apps and piecing together the same picture by hand: what's on the calendar, what needs a reply, what's actually urgent versus just unread. That's a pattern this course has already covered — checking something repetitive and turning it into a summary — applied to a data source everyone already has.

1Connect an Email and Calendar MCP Server

Claude Code has no built-in access to your email or calendar. It needs an MCP connection — the mechanism from Lesson 4.4 — before it can read a single message or event.

1. Identify your provider: Google Workspace (Gmail + Google Calendar) or Microsoft 365 (Outlook Mail + Outlook Calendar) are the two most common.
2. Check code.claude.com/docs, claude.ai's Connectors settings, or type /mcp inside Claude Code to see whether a ready-made connector exists for your provider today — Lesson 4.4, Step 4 covers what to do if it doesn't yet.
3. Add the connector using the claude mcp add --scope user --transport <type> <name> <address> pattern from Lesson 4.4, Step 3, filling in the real name and address you found.
4. Approve the sign-in prompt that opens in your browser.
5. Run /mcp to confirm it connected and see the tools it provides.

Provider	What You're Connecting	Where to Check the Current Setup
Google Workspace	Gmail + Google Calendar	/mcp inside Claude Code, claude.ai Connectors, or code.claude.com/docs
Microsoft 365	Outlook Mail + Outlook Calendar	/mcp inside Claude Code, claude.ai Connectors, or code.claude.com/docs

2Dictate What "Day Ahead" Means to You

With the connector in place, describe the briefing you actually want — in one long message, the same dictate-to-setup approach from Lesson 4.3.

1. Create a new folder, for example daily-briefing, and open it in Claude Code.
2. Adapt and send the example dictation below.
3. Answer any clarifying questions Claude Code asks.
4. Review the proposed CLAUDE.md before approving it.

I want a daily briefing that pulls together my calendar and my email
so I don't have to check two apps every morning. For today's calendar,
I want every meeting listed with the time, the attendees, and one line
on what I need to know or prepare before it. For email, I only care
about messages from the last 24 hours that are unread or flagged —
summarize what's actually urgent and skip routine notifications and
anything already read. If an email is from someone who's also on
today's calendar, connect the two — mention it next to that meeting
instead of as a separate item. Keep the whole briefing short enough to
read in two minutes. Set this up as a project with a README and a
CLAUDE.md capturing these rules, and ask me anything you need first.

What Claude Code should produce:

daily-briefing/
├── README.md              Explains the briefing and how to run it
├── CLAUDE.md               Standing rules: what counts as urgent, how
│                           long the briefing should be, how to cross-
│                           reference meetings and email
└── output/
    └── todays-briefing.md Where each day's briefing lands

3Build the Daily-Briefing Skill

One skill, using both the calendar and email tools your connector provides.

1. Ask Claude Code to build the skill, describing its job precisely (the description below is ready to use).
2. Review the SKILL.md it produces.
3. Run /daily-briefing and check the output against what you actually needed to know this morning.

What to tell Claude Code to build:

Build a skill called daily-briefing. Its job: pull today's calendar
events using the calendar tool, and pull unread or flagged email from
the last 24 hours using the email tool. Cross-reference the two — if
an email sender is also an attendee on a meeting today, mention that
email next to that meeting instead of as a separate item. Produce one
short briefing: a schedule block listing each meeting with attendees
and a one-line prep note, followed by a short list of anything urgent
left in email that doesn't tie to a meeting. Save it to
output/todays-briefing.md and show it to me.

What this produces (skills/daily-briefing/SKILL.md, abbreviated):

---
name: daily-briefing
description: Pull today's calendar and recent email into one morning
briefing, cross-referencing meeting attendees with email senders. Use
when the user says "give me my briefing," "what's today look like,"
or "/daily-briefing."
---

# daily-briefing

1. Fetch today's calendar events using the connected calendar tool.
2. Fetch email from the last 24 hours that is unread or flagged, using
   the connected email tool.
3. For each meeting, check whether any attendee also sent a fetched
   email. If so, fold a one-line summary of that email into that
   meeting's entry instead of listing it separately.
4. Write the schedule block: time, attendees, and one prep line per
   meeting.
5. Write a short "Flagged in Email" section for anything urgent that
   didn't tie to a meeting.
6. Save the result to output/todays-briefing.md and display it.

Sample output:

Today's Briefing — Tuesday

09:00 — Budget Review (with Marcus Chen, Priya Nair)
Marcus emailed last night asking to move the Q3 numbers earlier in
the agenda — worth confirming before the meeting starts.

11:30 — Vendor Call (with external: Aria Logistics)
No related email. First call with this vendor — no history yet.

Flagged in Email
- IT: password reset required by end of week (not tied to a meeting)

4Optional — Run It Automatically Every Morning

Everything above still requires opening Claude Code and typing /daily-briefing. This step is optional: it runs the briefing before you sit down.

Windows

1. Before proceeding, revisit Lesson 4.1, Step 4 — confirm you trust /daily-briefing's output from several manual runs first.
2. Open Windows Task Scheduler.
3. Create a basic task set to run daily, for example at 7:00 AM.
4. Point the action at the command below.

claude -p "/daily-briefing" --cwd "C:\path\to\daily-briefing"

Mac

1. Before proceeding, revisit Lesson 4.1, Step 4 — confirm you trust /daily-briefing's output from several manual runs first.
2. Open Terminal and run crontab -e (opens in the nano editor by default).
3. Add the line below for a daily 7:00 AM run, then save (Ctrl+O, Enter, Ctrl+X in nano).

0 7 * * * claude -p "/daily-briefing" --cwd "$HOME/daily-briefing"

Verification

Related Resources

• claude.ai — The Claude AI platform
• code.claude.com/docs — Official documentation
• support.claude.com — Help center and troubleshooting