Weekends are one practical real estate agent workflow.
Tuesday's edition covered Google's Daily Brief, a morning AI briefing pulled from your live Gmail and Calendar. But what if you are already using Claude everyday? Does it require Google? Here's how I build a portable version for yourself. 25 minutes to build, 5 minutes a morning to run.
Step 1: Install Claude desktop and turn on Cowork (5 minutes)
Download the Claude desktop app from claude.com/download. Sign in with your Pro or Max account. Click your profile, open Settings, and switch on Cowork mode. Cowork is in research preview right now, so if you don't see it under Settings, the same screen has a waitlist link. Pick a folder on your computer as the Cowork workspace. Documents works fine.
Step 2: Connect Gmail and Google Calendar (5 minutes)
Open the Connectors tab inside Cowork. Click Connect on the Google row and authorize Gmail and Calendar access for your Claude account. Test the connection by typing in the main Cowork chat: "List my next five calendar events." If you get the list back, you're connected.
Step 3: Write the morning brief instructions (5 minutes)
Still in the Cowork chat, paste this:
"Run a morning brief task every weekday at 6:00 AM Eastern. Pull from these sources:
- Google Calendar: today plus tomorrow morning's first events. - Calendar invitations needing a response. - Gmail: anything unread from the past 12 hours, and anything I sent in the past 48 hours where I'm still waiting on a reply. - Workspace folder /transactions/: status notes for every open deal.
Write a 200-word brief in plain prose. Open with 'Hi [my first name], here's your day at a glance' and a relevant emoji.
TODAY - Calendar events with times, locations, and one-line prep notes. Flag conflicts and travel time over 15 minutes between back-to-back items. - Calendar invitations needing a response, each with a one-line recommendation. - The two emails that need a reply before noon. For each: sender, the ask in one phrase, and the suggested action (reply, call, defer, or pass).
LOOKING AHEAD - Active transactions: anything in /transactions/ that needs to move today (contingencies, appraisals, attorney or lender items, title issues). - Pipeline alerts: listings near 30 days on market, buyers quiet for over 7 days, or contracts within 48 hours of any contingency. Maximum three items.
Close with: - TODAY'S ONE PRIORITY: the single most important thing I should make happen. Be opinionated. - SKIP LIST: two items I can safely defer to tomorrow or later.
Save the brief as morning-brief-[YYYY-MM-DD].md in this workspace folder and save it as a draft for the key information that is important to share with my team - subject '[Date] Morning Brief.'"
Cowork will read back what it understood. Test it and tweak any section before you schedule.
Step 4: Schedule it (5 minutes)
Type: "Schedule this task to run every weekday at 6:00 AM Eastern starting tomorrow." Cowork creates the scheduled task and shows it in the Tasks panel. You can pause, edit, or rerun it from there at any time.
Step 5: Tune on Sundays (5 minutes a week)
Open the workspace folder and re-read the past week's briefs. If a section never got used, open the scheduled task and edit it out. If a question kept coming up that the brief didn't answer, add it as a new section. The brief sharpens every week and the file archive becomes a searchable log of what mattered each morning.
Saturday, June 6 (10am-6pm ET): I'm running my next one-day Claude workshop for real estate agents. Five concrete workflows built live in one session, including a deeper version of this one. Sign up here.
-Matt
