Tutorial 25

Set up your Monday morning briefing

Why this matters

Most people start Monday with a fragmented sense of what they walked into. Email backlog. Slack scrollback. A vague worry about the deadline that’s coming up. Twenty minutes wasted before the actual work starts.

A weekly briefing fixes that — IF it’s designed for what to worry about, not what happened. “Sales were $X” is information. “Sales were $X — that’s 15% below where we were last quarter; the slip is concentrated in three accounts you should reach out to today” is a briefing. The first wastes your attention; the second redirects it. Today, you build the second kind. By the time it lands next Monday, you’ll start the week knowing exactly what to do first.

Quick start

1. Sign in — open Auxot in your browser and log in.
2. Open chat with the Admin Agent — click Chat in the left menu, make sure the agent picker reads “Admin Agent.”
3. Describe what you want briefed on — paste something like “I want a Monday morning briefing covering [what — sales, support tickets, project status]. It should surface anything I should worry about, not just summarize what happened. Pull from [where the data lives — context files, agents, integrations].”
4. Answer the Admin Agent’s questions — what time, what channel (chat, email, Slack), how long the briefing should be, what to skip.
5. Confirm — the Admin Agent proposes the full setup (the briefing agent, the schedule, the delivery). Say “yes, set it up” and the workflow goes live.

Done? Next Monday at the time you specified, the briefing arrives. Read it before email, before Slack, before anything else.

The agent can do that?

Briefings get more useful as you tune them. These three prompts each push the briefing toward “I actually changed what I did this morning because of it.”

1. Have the Admin Agent design what your briefing should cover, based on what you actually do

Open chat with the Admin Agent:

I'm setting up a Monday morning briefing. Looking at the agents I have and the work my business does, what should the briefing cover? Make it a tight list — five sections at most, each with a one-line description of what shows up there and why it'd matter to me. Bias toward "what should I worry about" not "what happened."

Why it’s non-obvious: Most people set up a briefing by listing the things they think they should know, then end up ignoring half of them. The Admin Agent reads what kinds of work you actually do and recommends sections you’d actually act on. Saves you three rounds of revision.

2. Have the briefing agent draft a “preview” of next Monday’s briefing right now

Once the briefing agent is built, ask it directly:

Pretend it's next Monday morning and I just opened your briefing. Generate the full text I'd see. Use real or representative data — don't tell me you "would" cover X; show me you covering X.

Why it’s non-obvious: Reading a draft tells you in 30 seconds whether the briefing’s structure is right. Sections that read poorly get cut. Sections you skim mean the prompt needs work. Iterate the briefing’s instructions before it’s been running for three weeks producing reports you don’t read.

3. Have the Admin Agent expand the briefing to a multi-recipient version after the first month

If the briefing is useful enough that you’d want your team to see it, ask:

The Monday briefing has been running for [N weeks] and I've found it useful. Now I want a team version — same data, but framed for [my direct reports / the leadership team / the whole company]. What should change between the version I read and the version they read? Keep what works, change what doesn't translate.

Why it’s non-obvious: Most internal reports get written for one audience and forwarded to others, and they don’t land. The Admin Agent reads what you’ve kept in your version and what’s specific to your role, then proposes the audience-shifted version. Different audiences need different framings even of the same numbers.

Go deeper

The “what to worry about” framing

Most weekly summaries answer the question “what happened last week?” That’s a journalist’s question. The leader’s question is “what should I do about it this week?” — and that’s a different output.

To get the second kind, your briefing’s instructions need to direct the agent to:

• Compare the past week’s data to a baseline (last week, same week last year, target).
• Flag deviations explicitly, not bury them in a list.
• Name the specific action implied by each deviation, when one is obvious.
• Mark the parts you’re certain about vs the parts that are inferences.

The Description for the briefing agent should include something like: “Always lead with what changed and what’s at risk. Save ‘what happened’ for the appendix. If the data shows anything I should specifically do this week, name the action — don’t make me read between the lines.”

Where to deliver it

Three reasonable places, ranked by how often people actually read what shows up there:

1. Slack DM to yourself — appears in the same place you’d be on Monday morning anyway. Tutorial 16 covers Slack wiring.
2. Email — works if you check email first thing. Less reliable than Slack for most people.
3. Auxot chat thread — a dedicated thread with your briefing agent. Lowest friction to set up, highest friction to remember to open.

Pick where your morning attention actually lives, not where you wish it lived.

Time it for when you’d actually read it

The default “7am Monday” is wrong for most people. Some teams start at 9. Some start Tuesday. Some only really read on weekends. Time the briefing for the moment you’d be willing to spend three minutes reading something — that might be Sunday evening, Monday at 7am, or Monday at 9:30 after the first meeting.

Troubleshooting

• The briefing is too long. Your Description is asking for too many sections. Cut to the four or five that matter most. Length isn’t quality.
• The briefing repeats itself week to week. The agent’s instructions are too generic. Add framing like “only flag things that have changed since last week’s briefing” so it stops re-summarizing the same baseline.
• The briefing missed something important. Two failure modes: either the agent didn’t have access to the data, or the Description didn’t tell it to look there. Check the agent’s context files and tools first; then sharpen the Description.
• The briefing arrives but I don’t read it. Move it to where your morning attention lives (see “Where to deliver it”). Or accept that weekly is too infrequent or too frequent for you and re-time it.

Variations & edge cases

• Daily briefings are usually the wrong move — too much noise, not enough new signal. Reserve daily for operational dashboards (Tutorial 14), not for “what should I worry about.”
• Monthly briefings are useful at the executive level but less useful at the operator level. Mix: Monday weekly for tactical, monthly for strategic.
• Multi-recipient briefings can quickly drift into “wallpaper” if everyone gets it. Power Move 3 covers the audience-shift; even better, send the right slice to each audience instead of broadcasting one version.
• Free tier — same scheduling capabilities as paid tiers; you just can’t have multiple recipients on different teams (Free is single-team).

Walkthrough

Step 1: Open chat with the Admin Agent

Click Chat in the left menu. Make sure the agent picker at the top reads “Admin Agent.”

Step 2: Describe what you want briefed on

Paste something like:

I want a Monday morning briefing about [the work — e.g., "our weekly customer support tickets, sales pipeline health, and any project deadlines coming up in the next two weeks"]. Pull from [the agents and integrations I've already built]. Keep it under 200 words. Lead with anything I should worry about. Skip anything routine.

The Admin Agent will ask clarifying questions: which agents cover the data, which delivery channel you want, when it should arrive, what format you prefer.

Step 3: Answer the questions

Common decisions:

• Delivery channel. Slack DM, email, or chat thread. Pick where your morning attention is.
• Time. When you’d actually read it. “Sunday at 6pm so I can think about the week before it starts” is a real and good answer.
• Length. Most people overestimate how much they’ll read. Start at 200 words; tune up only if it feels thin.
• Format. Plain prose, bulleted list, or a hybrid. The Admin Agent can show you a sample of each.

Step 4: Confirm and let the Admin Agent set it up

The Admin Agent proposes the full setup:

• A briefing agent with a clear Description and the right context files attached.
• A workflow (Tutorial 13) that runs on a schedule and triggers the briefing agent.
• A delivery integration (Tutorial 16 if Slack, otherwise email or chat thread).

Read the proposal. Confirm with “yes, set it up” — or push back on specifics (“shorter please,” “deliver to email instead,” “skip the sales section, I get that elsewhere”).

Step 5: Generate a preview

Use Power Move 2 above:

Generate the briefing as if it's next Monday and I just opened it. Show me the full text.

If the preview reads well, you’re done. If not, edit the briefing agent’s Description and re-preview. Two or three iterations usually nails the format.

Step 6: Wait for next Monday

The first real briefing arrives at the time you specified. Read it. Note one thing you did differently because of it. That note is the only test of whether the briefing is working.

What’s next

• → Tutorial 13: Run a workflow — the scheduling layer your briefing rides on.
• → Tutorial 16: Connect Slack to your agents — needed if you’re delivering to Slack.
• → Tutorial 24: Audit and clean up your agent fleet — same recurring-pattern idea applied to maintenance instead of awareness.

Reference

• Pages in Auxot: Chat (with Admin Agent and the briefing agent), Settings → Workflows
• Default cadence: weekly Monday is the most common useful pattern; daily is usually too noisy, monthly usually too sparse.
• Lead with risks, not events. What changed, what’s at risk, what action is implied.
• Length target: 200 words is a good starting point; tune up only if thin.
• See also: Tutorial 07: Create an agent from scratch, Tutorial 13: Run a workflow, Tutorial 14: Build your first Dashboard (related but different).