05 · A daily briefing that sends itself
At a glance
| Solves | Getting weather, industry news, headlines and a to-do summary at a fixed time each day |
| Needs | The QQ Mail connector (or a WeCom bot / the mini program); the web-search Skill |
| Takes | 15 minutes to set up; 2–3 minutes per automatic run afterwards |
| Risk | Medium — it sends outward, and it runs unattended |
The situation
Every morning you spend twenty minutes across five sites finding out what happened in your industry yesterday. Perhaps three items in that twenty minutes are actually useful.
Preparation
1) Connect a delivery channel
QQ Mail is the usual one. The flow is in Connectors:
Connector page → find the QQ Mail card → click + → scan with your phone → confirm permissions → done.
Note the "send mail on your behalf" permission — that is what makes delivery possible.
Alternatives: a WeCom bot, or the WorkBuddy mini program. See Automations.
2) Install the search Skill
web-search. Without it, the "industry news" section comes from model memory, and model memory has a cut-off date.
The prompt
Step one: run it by hand
Get a manual run working before scheduling anything
The official docs stress this, for a practical reason: automations are unattended.
If the delivery path is broken, you find out on day three that you have had no briefings — and three runs' worth of credits are already gone.
Generate today's briefing and send it to my QQ Mail.
Four sections:
1. Today's weather in Shenzhen (one line, with clothing and umbrella advice)
2. Significant developments in AI office tooling / agents in the last 24 hours,
at most 5, each: one-line summary + source link + publication time
3. Other notable tech news, at most 3, same format
4. My to-do summary: read D:/work/todo.md and list what is due today or overdue
Requirements:
- Every item must carry a source link; skip anything without a reliable source
- No "here is your briefing" preamble
- Subject line format: [Daily Briefing] 2026-03-04
- Keep the whole thing to about three phone screensExecution typically covers searching, organising, generating and sending, taking 2–3 minutes.
Go and check your inbox. Verify the content, that the links open, and that it reads well on a phone.
Step two: turn it into a schedule
Create an automation that runs the briefing task above at 08:30 every morning,
keeping the same content and format.Once created, manage it under Automation in the sidebar, or add it manually there.
Step three: refine after a few days
Change the briefing to weekdays only, no public holidays.
For content: drop the weather, raise AI developments to 8 items but tighten
the bar — only items with a concrete product release, funding round or
disclosed data. No opinion pieces or commentary.
Make the register concise and professional, no adjectives.Why it is written that way
"Every item must carry a source link; skip anything without a reliable source." This is the life-or-death line for briefing work. Without it you get a briefing that reads impressively and has three invented items — and you will not notice, because they read exactly like the real ones.
"The last 24 hours", not "recently". Time ranges must be absolute. "Recently" to a model might mean three months.
"At most 5." The ceiling matters more than the floor. Without one, it pads with marginal items to make up the number.
"About three phone screens." A better length constraint than "under 500 words" — it describes the actual reading experience, which the model understands and you can verify.
A date in the subject line. Dozens of identically named emails in an inbox are unusable.
Step three's "no opinion pieces or commentary." You only discover you need this after a few days. Commentary is the biggest noise source in briefing work — plentiful, loudly headlined, low in information.
Acceptance checklist
After the first manual run:
- [ ] The email arrived in the inbox, not the spam folder
- [ ] Open three links at random and check they work and match the summary
- [ ] The time range is right (not three-month-old news)
- [ ] The to-do section read your actual file rather than inventing one
- [ ] It reads properly on a phone
Once scheduled, check daily for the first week and spot-check weekly after that.
Variations
Push to WeCom instead of email
Enable Push to WeCom bot in the automation's detail page, choosing between the assistant's WeCom bot and a dedicated automation bot.
Prefer the dedicated notification bot
With the assistant's bot, the result is sent as a notification only and is not written into the assistant's context — you cannot reply "expand on that second item."
A dedicated notification bot is separate from the assistant message channel: briefings stay briefings, conversation stays conversation.
A team version to a project group
Every Monday at 09:00, generate last week's industry round-up and push it to
the WeCom project group.
Contents:
1. Significant developments, grouped: product releases / funding / data / policy
2. Competitor movements, focusing on A, B and C
3. Two topics worth the team discussing, with one line of reasoning each
Source link on every item.Add your own workbench status
Add a "my workbench" section to the briefing:
- Tasks WorkBuddy finished yesterday
- Files under D:/projects that changed yesterday
- To-dos due this weekSummarise without sending
If you would rather it did not send anything outward:
Generate the briefing and save it to D:/briefings/YYYY-MM-DD.md. Do not send it.
Also append a link line to D:/briefings/index.md for easy review.You open the folder each morning, and you have side-stepped the whole outbound-sending risk category.
Unattended considerations
Scheduled tasks run when you are absent
The official safety note: set prompts involving file writes, deletion or financial operations carefully.
Briefings are relatively low-risk (read, write a new file, send an email), but adding "and tidy up my to-do file" to the prompt raises the risk class immediately.
Recommendation: keep briefing tasks read-only. Do file tidying in a separate manual task.
Three disciplines:
- Run new automations at low frequency first — for a daily job, set it weekly for two weeks
- Keep an auditable record of anything sent outward
- Work out the monthly cost — daily means 30 runs a month; at 30 credits a run that is 900 credits, close to a quarter of the standard plan
FAQ
The news in the briefing is invented.
Confirm web-search is installed and enabled, then add a hard constraint:
Every item must carry an accessible source link. Delete items where you cannot
provide one — do not keep them. If a category has no qualifying item, write
"nothing today".That last sentence matters — it removes the pressure to invent rather than leave a gap.
The email goes to spam.
Mark it as not spam and allowlist the sender the first time.
The automation did not fire.
The machine must be on with WorkBuddy running — automation configuration lives on the local client and tasks run on your machine. A closed lid, a shutdown or a quit client all stop it.
Can one rule cover multiple times?
Yes, and it should. Schedule rules support multiple days per week (Mon/Wed/Fri at 09:00) and per month (the 1st, 15th and 28th). The official guidance is to combine them into one rule — automated task counts are capped by plan.
What happens if the push channel drops?
If credentials are wrong or WeCom is unavailable, a failed notification does not block the task — it still runs, you just do not hear about it. When a channel is unbound, its label shows a red dot and a rebind prompt, but the push switch does not turn itself off.
So: when briefings stop arriving, check the channel before assuming the task did not run.