Build a Morning Briefing Workflow

Your Personal Morning Radio, Powered by AI

🔄 Quick Recall: In the last lesson, you connected your messaging app and had your first conversation with OpenClaw. You started with low-risk tasks — weather checks, file creation, document summaries. Now let’s build something that runs without you even asking.

Imagine waking up to this message in WhatsApp every morning at 6:30 AM:

☀️ Good morning! Here’s your Wednesday briefing:
Weather: 72°F, partly cloudy. No rain — perfect for biking to work.
Calendar (3 events today):
9:00 AM: Team standup (15 min)
11:30 AM: Lunch with Sarah at Cafe Roma
3:00 PM: Q1 Budget Review — prep notes attached
News that matters to you:
OpenAI announced GPT-5 pricing changes
Your competitor launched a new product feature
Local transit delays on the Blue Line (consider an alternate route)

You didn’t ask for any of this. Your agent prepared it while you were sleeping.

This is a cron job — a task that runs on a schedule. And it’s one of the highest-value things OpenClaw can do.

What Is a Cron Job?

Think of a cron job as an alarm clock for your agent. You tell it:

When to wake up (every day at 6:30 AM)
What to do when it wakes up (gather weather, calendar, news)
Where to deliver the result (your WhatsApp, Telegram, etc.)

The term “cron” comes from the Greek word chronos (time). It’s been a standard scheduling tool in computers since the 1970s — long before AI agents existed.

OpenClaw also supports heartbeats, which are different: instead of running at a fixed time, a heartbeat periodically checks for a condition and acts when it’s met. Think of cron as “every morning at 6:30” and heartbeat as “whenever a new urgent email arrives.”

For your morning briefing, cron is what you want.

✅ Quick Check: If you wanted OpenClaw to check your inbox every hour and alert you about messages from your boss, would you use a cron job or a heartbeat? (Answer: A heartbeat — you’re responding to a condition, not a fixed time.)

Building the Briefing: Step by Step

Step 1: Tell Your Agent What You Want

Start simple. Send this message to your agent:

“I want a morning briefing delivered every day at 6:30 AM. Include: (1) weather for [your city], (2) my calendar events for today, and (3) three headlines from [your industry] news. Keep it short — bullet points, not paragraphs.”

Your agent will likely respond with a plan and ask clarifying questions. Answer honestly — the more specific you are, the better the briefing.

Step 2: Connect the Data Sources

Your briefing needs three ingredients:

Weather: OpenClaw can pull weather data from the web without any special integration. Just tell it your city and any preferences (e.g., “I bike to work, so always mention rain probability”).

Calendar: If you haven’t connected Google Calendar or Apple Calendar yet, your agent will walk you through it. This requires giving the agent read access to your calendar. In the control panel, you can limit this to read-only — the agent can see events but can’t create or delete them.

News: You have options:

Web browsing (agent reads news sites)
RSS feeds (more reliable, less API cost)
Specific sources you name (“always check TechCrunch, The Verge, and my company’s competitor blog”)

Step 3: Set the Schedule

Tell your agent:

“Set this up as a cron job that runs every morning at 6:30 AM. Deliver it to my [WhatsApp/Telegram] channel.”

Under the hood, the agent creates a cron schedule. If you’re curious, the syntax looks like this:

30 6 * * *

That translates to: minute 30, hour 6, every day, every month, every day of the week.

You don’t need to write this yourself — just tell the agent the time and it handles the rest.

Step 4: Test and Refine

Don’t wait until tomorrow morning. Ask the agent:

“Run the morning briefing now as a test.”

Review the output. Is it too long? Too short? Missing something? Send feedback:

“Add stock market overnight summary. Remove the general news — just keep industry news. Make the weather one line, not a paragraph.”

This is where the magic starts: every refinement gets stored in memory. Tomorrow’s briefing will reflect your feedback without you asking again.

✅ Quick Check: Why should you test the briefing immediately instead of waiting until the next morning? (Answer: Testing immediately lets you catch issues and refine the format before it runs unsupervised. Waiting until morning means a bad briefing — and no chance to fix it before the day starts.)

How the Briefing Gets Smarter Over Time

On day one, your briefing is generic. By day thirty, it’s personal. Here’s what changes:

Day	What Happens
Day 1	Generic weather, plain calendar listing, broad news headlines
Day 7	Agent knows you bike to work; mentions rain specifically. Learns you ignore sports news.
Day 14	Knows your recurring meetings don’t need mention. Highlights prep needed for important ones.
Day 30	Predicts you’ll want coffee shop alternatives when it rains. Tracks your competitor’s announcements. Notes your lunch preference patterns.

This isn’t magic — it’s the memory system from Lesson 4 at work. Every briefing interaction adds to the agent’s understanding of you.

One OpenClaw user described the experience: “It’s like having an executive assistant who actually remembers what you care about after the first week.”

Customization Ideas

Once your basic briefing works, consider adding:

Time-sensitive layers:

Monday: add “week ahead” calendar preview
Friday: add weekend weather forecast
First of the month: add subscription renewal reminders

Personal layers:

Commute alerts (transit delays, traffic on your route)
Package delivery tracking
Social media mentions of your business

Professional layers:

Overnight emails that need immediate attention (careful — Lesson 6 covers email safety)
Project deadline countdown
Team availability for the day

What Could Go Wrong (And How to Fix It)

Problem	Cause	Fix
Briefing doesn’t arrive	Cron job not running	Check that your Docker container is running with `docker ps`
Wrong weather location	Agent used wrong city	Send: “My city is [city, state/country]. Always use this for weather.”
Calendar shows old events	Stale calendar connection	Reconnect the calendar integration in the control panel
Too expensive per briefing	Agent using too many API calls	Tell the agent: “Keep briefing generation under $0.10. Use shorter responses.”
News is irrelevant	Agent doesn’t know your interests	Send: “My professional interests are [list]. Personal interests are [list]. Never include [topics you hate].”

Key Takeaways

Cron jobs are scheduled tasks — set the time once, and OpenClaw delivers every day
Start simple: weather + calendar + news is the proven starter combo
Test immediately and refine before letting it run unsupervised
The briefing gets smarter over time as OpenClaw’s memory learns your preferences
You can layer complexity once the basics work (commute alerts, social mentions, deadline countdowns)
Cron is for fixed schedules; heartbeat is for event-driven triggers — both are powerful

Up Next

Your morning routine is automated. Now let’s tackle the big one: email. In the next lesson, you’ll learn how to let OpenClaw triage your inbox without falling victim to prompt injection attacks — the single biggest security risk in AI agent email handling.