Time to implement: <5 mins
Video tutorial
The problem
Every morning starts the same way. Open the inbox, scroll back through last night's emails, cross-reference the calendar, try to remember what got left half-finished yesterday, then do a quick LinkedIn check on whoever is on the 10am. Twenty to thirty minutes gone before any actual work happens.
The tools to fix this have existed for a while. Calendar APIs, email APIs, LLMs that can summarise and prioritise. But the wiring has always been the painful part. Zapier and Make work but cost real money at any reasonable volume, and the logic lives across five different tabs. n8n is more flexible but you are now running infrastructure. And until recently, the AI half of the loop had to be triggered manually — you had to be sitting at your laptop for the workflow to fire.
That changed quietly with Claude Routines. Scheduled, cloud-hosted, MCP-aware. The whole "personal chief of staff" idea suddenly costs cents to run and takes ten minutes to set up.
What I built
A daily morning briefing that lands in my inbox at 6am. Top three priorities, anything I've missed, open loops from yesterday, a short motivational note, and pre-meeting research on everyone I'm seeing that day — LinkedIn, company, recent news, all of it.
Built end-to-end in about ten minutes. Runs in the cloud whether my laptop is open or not. Costs a few pennies a day.
The stack
Claude Desktop as the control surface. The web app works, but the desktop client makes connector setup easier and is where Routines live cleanest.
Composio as the bridge between Claude and Outlook. Outlook's native Claude integration is clunky and gated by plan tier. Composio sidesteps that — one MCP endpoint, one auth flow, and Claude can read mail, calendar, and contacts. If you are on Gmail, skip Composio entirely and use the native Gmail connector in Claude. It is one click.
Claude Routines as the scheduler. This is the actual unlock. Routines run in the cloud on a schedule or a trigger, which means the workflow does not need a machine to be awake. That single change removes the reason most people reached for n8n or Make in the first place.
Optional CRM and meeting-transcript connectors — Attio, Krisp, whatever you use — so the brief can reference prior conversations with the person you are about to meet, not just their LinkedIn headline.
How it works
Step 1: Connect Composio to Outlook.
Go to composio.dev and sign up.
From the dashboard, click "See all apps".
Find Outlook in the list and click Connect.
Authorise with your Outlook credentials in the popup.
Return to the Composio dashboard and confirm Outlook now appears under active Connections.
Two minutes end to end. If you are on Gmail, skip this entire step — Claude has a native Gmail connector that bypasses Composio altogether.
Step 2: Connect Claude Desktop to Composio.
Open Claude Desktop and go to Settings → Connectors.
Click "Add custom connector".
Name it "Composio" and paste the Composio MCP URL into the URL field.
Hit Add. Claude opens a browser tab asking you to authorise — click through and confirm.
Back in Claude, click into the new Composio connector.
For every permission with a "hand" icon (manual approval required), toggle it to "Always allow". This is the bit that stops scheduled routines stalling overnight on a permission prompt.
For Gmail users: Connectors → Browse connectors → Gmail → Connect. One click, no MCP URL needed.
Step 3: Test the connection manually.
Open a new Claude chat.
Send: "Use the Composio connection to send me details of my most recent email."
Confirm Claude returns a sensible result with real email content.
Doing this once manually flushes any first-run permission prompts before a scheduled run hits them at 6am.
Step 4: Create the routine.
In Claude Desktop, go to Routines → New routine.
Choose "Remote" (this is what makes it run in the cloud without your laptop open).
Name it "Morning Briefing v1".
Paste in the prompt below.
Set the schedule to whatever time you want the email to land — 6am works for me.
You are a personal chief of staff. Each morning, read my outlook emails, and calendar using the Composio connector.
Generate a morning briefing with the following sections:
1. Top 3 Priorities for Today (pulled directly from my notes, ranked if I have not already ranked them)
2. Anything I flagged as time-sensitive or must-not-forget
3. One thing to keep in mind or a brief motivational note based on what I am working on (keep this grounded and practical, not generic)
4. Open loops from yesterday if I mentioned anything unfinished
Where relevant do extra research online to provide a short summary of the people I am meeting, their organisation, their LinkedIn profile, any recent news about them or there company.
Keep the entire briefing under 400 words. Tone should be clear, calm, and direct. Send it as briefing-[YYYY-MM-DD].md via email to [your email here] Please ensure it is nicely formatted and readable e.g. with bold
Step 5: Restrict the routine's tool access.
In the routine settings, find the tools/connectors list.
By default Claude enables every connector you have — turn that off.
Enable only what the routine actually needs:
Composio (or Gmail) for email
Google Calendar (or Outlook Calendar via Composio) for the meeting list
Optionally your CRM (Attio etc.) so it can pull prior notes on people you are meeting
Optionally your meeting transcript tool (Krisp etc.) for the same reason
Save.
Smaller surface area, faster runs, fewer surprises.
Step 6: Run it once manually.
Click "Run now" on the routine.
Wait a minute or two for it to execute in the cloud.
Check your inbox.
If the format is off, edit the prompt and re-run. Iterate until the brief reads how you want it to.
Once dialled in, it stays dialled in. The routine fires automatically every morning from then on.
Outcomes
Ten minutes from zero to live. Most of which is clicking through auth screens.
Pennies per run. A single Claude call with a few tool invocations is a rounding error against what the same workflow costs in Zapier seats or Make operations.
Twenty to thirty minutes saved every morning. Not because the brief is magic, but because the pre-meeting research is the part that always gets skipped when the day is busy, and skipping it is what makes calls feel rushed.
Composable. Morning briefing is the obvious one. The same pattern handles end-of-day wrap-ups, weekly investor digests, deeper pre-meeting prep that pulls in past notes and matches them against a current commercial offer, or trigger-based routines that fire on a new calendar invite rather than a schedule.
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📩 Written by Ollie. Feel free to send us deals, announcements, or anything else using the link below or via LinkedIn.
