Your Monday briefing, on a schedule

Sunday night is when it usually hits. Mom's appointment. The college deposit. The work presentation. The thing you told your sister you'd handle.

A Monday briefing puts all of it on one page before your week starts. Here's how to set it up so it shows up on its own.

What you need

• Claude Pro or Max. Scheduled tasks aren't on the free plan. Pro is $20 a month, or $17 a month paid yearly.
• Your Google Calendar connected. This is where most of the briefing comes from.
• Gmail connected, if you want it. It lets Claude pull deadlines out of your email and leave the briefing in your drafts folder.
• 20-minutes the first time.

Step 1: Connect your calendar and email

1. Open a chat and click the + in the lower left.
2. Choose Connectors, then Manage connectors.
3. Click + next to Connectors, pick Google Calendar, and sign in with Google.
4. Do the same for Gmail if you want it.

Then check what it's allowed to do. Claude should ask for your approval before it sends, replies to or forwards an email. Anthropic's own help pages describe this inconsistently, so check your settings. If your account shows options for each action, set sending to Needs approval or Blocked. Leave reading on.

Step 2: Write your briefing by hand once

Do this before you schedule anything. Open a chat and ask for this week's briefing. See what comes back and fix it until it's right.

Here's a starting prompt. Change the parts in brackets.

Look at my Google Calendar for the next seven days and my email from the past week. Give me a one-page Monday briefing with these sections:
1. This week at a glance: every appointment and event, by day, with times.
2. Deadlines: anything due this week, from my calendar or email.
3. For my parents: anything involving [Mom/Dad], including appointments, refills and bills.
4. For the kids: school, sports, forms, payments.
5. Things I might be forgetting: emails I haven't answered that seem to need a reply.
Keep it under one page. Don't send, delete or change anything. When it's ready, save it as a Gmail draft addressed to me with the subject "Monday briefing."

Run it two or three times. Each time, tell Claude what was missing or what you didn't need. You're teaching it what a good briefing looks like for your life.

Step 3: Put it on a schedule

Scheduled tasks live in Cowork, Claude's mode for longer jobs. You'll find it in the desktop app, and on the web and phone for paid plans. There are a few ways in. This is the one we'd use:

1. Click Scheduled in the left sidebar.
2. Click New task in the upper right.
3. Choose Create with Claude and answer its questions. Paste in your finished prompt from Step 2.
4. Set the frequency to weekly, for Monday morning.
5. Review the name, schedule and instructions, then click Schedule.

Shortcut: in any chat, type /schedule and describe what you want.

Step 4: Test it before you trust it

• Run it on demand from the Scheduled page. Don't wait for Monday.
• Read what it made. Each run shows up as its own session in Claude, and if you asked for a Gmail draft, check your drafts folder.
• Fix the instructions if anything is off. You can edit the task anytime, or pause it.

The rules we'd hold you to

• Write the prompt for a stranger. A scheduled run starts fresh. It doesn't remember the conversation where you set it up, so everything it needs has to be in the instructions.
• Say "don't send, delete or change anything" every time. Drafts only. You read and you send.
• Give it only what it needs. If the briefing needs your calendar and Gmail, it doesn't need anything else connected.
• Check it the first few Mondays. It will occasionally misread an email or miss an event. Trust builds over a few weeks.

A note about older videos

If you watched a Claude tutorial from earlier in 2026, it probably told you to keep your computer awake for scheduled tasks to run. That's no longer true for tasks like this one. They now run on Anthropic's side, even with your laptop closed. The exception is a task that needs files or apps on your computer.

Using ChatGPT instead?

ChatGPT has scheduled tasks too, including on the free plan, though the free version only runs once a day at most and at a general time of day. Paid plans can pick an exact time. Its help page lists Gmail, Slack and GitHub as task triggers but not your calendar, so test whether it can actually see your schedule before relying on it.

What we're still not sure about

Claude's help pages don't fully spell out how you're notified when a scheduled run finishes. Some people get a phone notification. Asking it to leave a Gmail draft is the most dependable way to make sure the briefing is waiting where you'll actually look.

Checked against Anthropic's and OpenAI's help pages, October 2026. These menus change often. If your screen doesn't match, trust the screen.