A Claude Cowork skill builds one morning brief from calendar, chat, and tasks

The task

The author began each morning in three places, Outlook, Teams, and Asana, and went through all three before the real work started. Checking a calendar, a message stream, and a task list one after another used up a good part of the morning, and a promised follow-up could easily slip.

What they did

The team built a custom skill in Claude Cowork that produces one brief each morning. It reads the day's Outlook calendar and flags meetings that need preparation. It checks email and Teams messages from the previous 24 hours for requests that still have no answer, including threads where the author promised a follow-up. It pulls the author's Asana tasks that are due today or overdue and lists the top ones. For team leaders it adds a count of overdue tasks per direct report. It also looks ahead five business days and flags high-stakes meetings that need preparation now. The brief has the same sections every day. The author gives each tool a role: Outlook shows where to be, Teams shows what people are saying, and Asana shows what the author committed to and by when.

What the source reports

According to the source, the brief takes about a minute to generate. According to the author, having these items in front of them each morning, without opening a project board, means fewer things fall through the cracks, and the overdue counts help a team leader see who may need a check-in.

Where the approval sits

The brief is a summary for its owner, who decides what to act on. The post describes no step where the skill replies to a message, changes a task, or sends anything, so every follow-up stays with a person.

Worth knowing

This is one person's short post on a product community forum. It shows what the brief contains but gives no measured savings and does not say how access to the mail, chat, and task accounts was set up. In a later reply, the author says generation takes a minute or less on some days and several minutes on others, depending on activity. The team-leader section only applies to people who manage direct reports.

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