The first 20 minutes of my day used to disappear into reconstructing it. I would scan email, open the calendar, find yesterday's loose ends, and work out what actually mattered before the first call. By Friday the week was a blur I could not have summarized if you asked me.
Three commands fixed it. I run them with Claude, they take a few minutes a day, and together they keep a continuous thread through my week. Here is the whole setup, prompts included.
Connect two things first
The rhythm reads from your email and your calendar, so connect those in Claude under Settings, Connections. Read-only access is enough and safer. If you keep a task list in an app, connect it too. If you do not, Claude can hold a simple running list in a file for you.
Where to save the prompts
All three prompts go in one place, and then they work everywhere. On Claude, click your initials in the bottom-left, open Settings, then Profile, and find the field that asks what preferences Claude should consider in your responses. Paste all three there. Whatever sits in that field loads into every new chat you start, so “check in” behaves the same in any conversation, on any plan, including the free one.
Use that preferences field, not Claude’s memory. Memory is for facts Claude picks up about you over time. A command you want to fire the same way every morning belongs in preferences, where the full text loads in every time you open a chat.
Two habits keep it clean. Keep the block short, because it loads on every single chat and a long one eats into the room Claude has for your actual work. And gate each prompt with its trigger words so it stays quiet until you call it. That wording is already built into the prompts below, the “when I say ‘check in’” part, and it is what keeps the routine dormant until you ask for it, rather than leaking into a chat where you only wanted a quick answer.
The Sunday review goes there too. If you later want it to run on its own, that is a scheduled task, which I cover in step 3.
1. Morning: “check in”
When I sit down, I type check in. Claude scans my inbox, calendar, and task list and shows me what is waiting on me, what carried over from yesterday, and what is open this week. Then it makes me choose 3 things for the day and parks the rest.
The prompt I saved:
When I say 'check in' or 'good morning', do this in two phases. First, scan my inbox, today's calendar, and my task list and show me: overnight action items, today's meetings, anything carried from yesterday, anything open this week. Then ask me what I want to do today, force-rank my answer to 3 priorities maximum, park the rest in my task list, and write the locked plan down. Do not draft anything unless I ask.2. Evening: “check out”
At the end of the day I type check out and tell it in a sentence how the day went. It compares that against the morning plan, carries anything still open to tomorrow, and ends with the one thing that matters most for the next day.
When I say 'check out' or 'wrap up my day', read this morning's locked plan, ask me what got done and what slipped, compare honestly, carry anything open to tomorrow, note anything new that surfaced, and end with the single most important thing for tomorrow.3. Sunday: the weekly review
Once a week I have Claude pull the calendar, tasks, and email highlights and write a one-page review before I have thought about Monday. The simplest way to run it is the same as the other two: on Sunday, type weekly review, and Claude does the rest. This works on every plan.
When I say 'weekly review', pull my calendar, completed and open tasks, and email highlights from the past 7 days, and produce a one-page weekly review: what happened, what is still open, what to prioritize Monday, and any pattern worth noting.If you want it to fire on its own, without you having to remember, that needs Claude’s scheduling, which is a separate feature. It lives in Cowork and in Claude Code routines. Cowork, the desktop app, runs a scheduled task while your computer is awake and the app is open, so a Sunday-evening run can land Monday morning if your laptop is closed. Claude Code routines run in the cloud on a set schedule whether your computer is on or not, and they sit on the paid plans. Either one starts with the word scheduled and the same review prompt above.
The one rule that does most of the work
The force-rank to only 3 most important tasks per day came from my habit of treating everything as equally urgent. Being made to pick 3 every morning, with everything else captured in a parking lot, is the discipline I never kept on my own.
And the check-out only works if I am honest about what slipped. A tidy list of wins teaches the weekly review nothing. “The board pre-read slipped again” is the line that makes the next week better.
I am a few weeks in, and the clearest change is that the week has a record now. Six weeks from today I can search what I decided and when.