Daily brief
- Industry term
A daily brief is one summary, assembled each morning from your accounts, that puts your schedule, the messages waiting on your reply, and your pressing tasks in one place to start the day.
The assistant judges what counts as pressing from clues in each item, such as a due date, a question addressed to you, or a sender you often answer. Each item it keeps becomes one line linked to its source, so the page stays short and the details stay one click away.
Where you’ll meet it
You teach music lessons from home, and each morning you plan your day from your assistant's summary. Today it says “No urgent messages.” That evening you learn its connection to your business email expired overnight, and a family had canceled the afternoon lesson.
What to do
A summary can report only on what it could open. Ask the assistant to start each daily brief with the sources it read and any it couldn't reach, so a dropped connection shows up at the top.
Easy to mix up
| Daily brief | Planner |
|---|---|
| No, it's a snapshot that new mail soon outdates | Yes, as long as you keep editing it |
Check yourself
Your daily brief always puts coworkers' requests above questions from your landlord and your family, and for you the home questions usually come first. What would fix the order?
Go deeperShortening can change a message, and strangers' mail can carry planted instructions
The name comes from executive and government practice, such as the President's Daily Brief that US intelligence agencies prepare each morning for one reader.
Cutting a message to one line can change its meaning. A client's “could we move to Thursday?” can come out as “moved to Thursday,” so before you act on a line, open the message behind it.
To write it, the assistant reads every new message, including ones strangers send. A message can hide instructions aimed at the assistant, an attack called “prompt injection,” so a safer setup gives the assistant that writes the brief read-only access and no way to send mail or change your calendar.