Morning Brief: Know What Matters First

Most people spend 15 minutes getting back into context before doing anything useful this automation eliminates that

You open your laptop. You type one command. Claude reads your project, your progress notes, your task list, and anything new that appeared since yesterday and gives you a clear prioritised brief on what to focus on today. In two minutes you are in context.

What the Morning Brief Does

When you run /morning-brief Claude will read your CLAUDE.md to understand the project, read progress.md which contains your session summaries to know what was last done, read tasks.md or a similar task list if it exists, check what files were recently changed, and produce a brief with yesterday's status, today's top 3 priorities, any decisions you left open, and any blockers to address first.

Setting It Up

Step 1: Create a tasks.md in your project

This is where you keep your current task list. Keep it simple:

# Tasks
## In Progress

• [ ] Finish the services section of the portfolio site
• [ ] Write the outreach email for the agency package

## Up Next

• [ ] Set up Netlify Forms on contact page
• [ ] Add Google Fonts audit to landing page

## Done This Week

• [x] Built hero section
• [x] Set up CLAUDE.md design rules

Claude will read this file during the brief.

Step 2: Create the slash command

Save this as ~/.claude/commands/morning-brief.md:

# Morning Brief

Generate a focused daily brief for this project.

Read the following files:

• @CLAUDE.md — project context and rules
• @progress.md — previous session summaries (if it exists)
• @tasks.md — current task list (if it exists)

Also check: what files have been modified in the last 48 hours?

Produce a morning brief with exactly this structure:

## STATUS

One sentence on where the project stands right now.

## YESTERDAY

What was completed or moved forward in the last session (from progress.md).

If no progress.md exists, say "No session notes found."

## TODAY — TOP 3

The 3 most important things to focus on today, ranked by impact.

Each item: one line only. No paragraphs.

## OPEN DECISIONS

Any decisions or questions from previous sessions that have not been resolved.

## FIRST ACTION

The single specific thing to do right now to create momentum.

Not a category. Not a plan. The actual next action.

Keep the entire brief under 300 words.

No preamble. Start directly with ## STATUS.

Step 3: Run it

Open Claude Code in your project folder. Type /morning-brief. Read the output. Do the first action.

Making It Better Over Time

The morning brief improves as your progress.md grows. After each session write a few lines to progress.md:

## 2026-07-02

• Built the contact form and connected Netlify Forms
• Decided to use Inter + Playfair Display for the final font pairing
• Still need to fix the mobile nav toggle (hamburger not closing on link click)
• Next: fix mobile nav, then run the full design audit

The next morning /morning-brief will pick this up and base today's priorities on it.

Variations Worth Building

Project-specific brief: copy the command to .claude/commands/morning-brief.md inside a specific project and not in ~/.claude/commands/ so it only applies to that one project.

Weekly review: create a /weekly-review command that looks back at the whole week's progress.md entries and produces a summary of what was accomplished and what priorities shifted.

Client brief: if you manage client projects create a /client-status command that reads each client project's progress notes and gives you a status update for each one in a single session.

Your Action Right Now

Create tasks.md in your current project with your actual tasks. Save the morning brief command to ~/.claude/commands/morning-brief.md. Run /morning-brief right now.

How accurate is it? What would you add to make it better? Update tasks.md or progress.md with anything it missed then run it again.