The Claude Chief of Staff: The Exact System Prompt and Full Build

I built a chief of staff inside Claude that reads my tools overnight and drops one ranked brief in my Slack before I'm even awake. By the time I open my laptop, I already know the three things that actually matter that day. Here's the whole thing: the connectors to wire up, the exact system prompt, and how to put it on a schedule so it shows up on its own.

The point isn't a summary of your inbox. Summaries are easy and mostly useless. The point is ranking. A good chief of staff tells you what to ignore, who's waiting on you, and what to do first. That's what this setup does.

1. The five tools you connect

The brief is only as good as what it can see, so the first step is giving Claude access to your real day. You connect these once and never think about it again:

Google Calendar, so it knows your meetings and timing.
Gmail, for the threads and replies people are waiting on.
Slack, which is usually where work actually happens, and where the brief gets delivered.
Your CRM, like HubSpot or Salesforce, so deals and contacts are in the picture.
Your docs and meeting notes, in Notion, Granola, or Google Drive.

You add these in Claude under Settings, then Connectors. Pick the tool, sign in once to authorize it, and you're done. Add them one at a time as you need them. If you want the full walkthrough on connectors, I wrote one here. The whole thing takes about ten minutes.

2. The system prompt (one page)

This is the engine. It's the instructions that tell Claude what to look at, what to skip, and how to rank. Paste this in as the skill or project instructions, swap the bracketed parts for your own people, and you're set.

You are my chief of staff. Every morning, before I'm awake, look across
everything I've connected and tell me what actually matters today.

Pull from: my calendar, my email, Slack, my CRM, and my notes.

Surface it in this order:
1. URGENT, act today. Anything with a deadline today, a person waiting
   on me, or money at risk.
2. My calendar. Each meeting with a one-line note on what I should walk
   in already knowing.
3. Who's waiting on me. Open threads where someone needs a reply from me.
4. Where my projects stand. One line each, and only the ones that moved
   or are stuck.
5. The 3 things to actually do today, ranked.

Rules:
- My VIPs are [your key people]. Anything from them jumps to the top.
- Skip newsletters, receipts, and automated emails.
- Rank ruthlessly. Don't list everything, tell me what matters.
- Remember my open commitments and the patterns you see over time.
- Tone: direct, peer level, no filler. Write like a sharp assistant,
  not a robot.

Give me one clean brief with clear headers, short enough to read in
under a minute.

The line that does the heavy lifting is "rank ruthlessly, don't list everything." Without it you get a tidy summary of your whole inbox, which is just noise in a nicer font. With it, you get a real call on what to do first.

3. What the brief actually looks like

Once it's wired up, the output reads like a sharp assistant caught you up over coffee. A calendar block with a note on each meeting, a short list of people waiting on you, where your projects stand, and the three moves to make today. It flags the contract that needs signing before noon, not the receipt from last night. That ranking is the whole value.

4. Run it on a schedule

The last piece is making it show up without you asking. You set it to run on a schedule so the brief is waiting when you wake up.

When: weekdays at 6:45am, your local time.
Where it runs: inside Claude Code as a scheduled task, which runs even with your laptop shut.
Where it lands: a Slack DM to yourself, or your inbox.

Claude Cowork has Scheduled Tasks too, and that works fine, with one catch: it only runs while your computer is on. If you want the brief to land no matter what, the Claude Code route is the one to use.

Where to start

Connect the tools first, even just calendar and email to begin. Paste the prompt and run it once by hand to see the brief. Once it looks right, put it on the schedule and forget about it. The setup is a one-time afternoon. The payoff is waking up every day with the noise already filtered out.

Wire it once, then let it run. The mornings where you open your laptop already knowing the three things that matter are the ones that change how the whole day goes.
– Anir