Introducing Email Brief: Your Inbox, Read Twice a Day

Going through email is a job. Most of what arrives in your inbox isn't actually for you — newsletters, calendar notifications, receipts, automated reports, CC'd threads from teams you're not really on. But hidden in the pile is a handful of threads that genuinely need a reply within the day. So you read everything just to find them. The math never works.

Email Brief is a new workflow that hands that job to your agent. Twice a day — by default at 7am and 2pm — it reads everything new in your inbox, drafts replies for the obvious ones, archives the noise, and gives you a single in-app report — the Brief — of what actually needs your attention.

From forty minutes a morning to a one-minute read.

How it works

1. Add the Email Brief workflow from the workflows library.
2. Choose what to call the recovery label (default Agency/Brief-Archived).
3. Your agent runs it at 7am and 2pm every day. Change the times if you want.

That's the whole setup.

What each run does

Three things, every time:

1. Reads everything new since the last Brief. The morning run covers anything that arrived since yesterday afternoon. The afternoon run picks up where the morning left off.
2. Decides what to do with each thread. Anything obvious gets a draft written in your Drafts folder. Anything urgent stays in your inbox. Anything that's noise gets archived.
3. Hands you the Brief. A single in-app report listing what was drafted, what needs your attention, and what got archived — every item linked back to Gmail.

You open the app twice a day, scan the Brief in under a minute, hit "send" on the drafts you agree with, and your inbox is handled.

Nothing disappears

Every archived thread gets a label. By default it's Agency/Brief-Archived, and every Brief lists archived threads with clickable Gmail links. If your agent archived something it shouldn't have, you click the link, drag it back to your inbox, done. Nothing is hidden, nothing is in Trash, no 30-day recovery window — just a normal Gmail label that you control.

A few guarantees baked in:

• Drafts only — never sends. Your agent writes the reply; you decide whether to send.
• Archives, never deletes. Mail leaves your inbox but stays in Gmail, fully searchable, under your label.
• Only reads new mail. Each Brief covers a fixed window since the last run; nothing else in your inbox is touched.
• Off any time. Delete the workflow and your agent immediately stops reading your inbox.

What a Brief looks like

Here's roughly what one looks like:

Under a minute to read. The drafts are already in Gmail — open, adjust a sentence, send.

Drafts in your voice

For threads that obviously need a reply, your agent writes one and leaves it as a draft in Gmail. It never sends anything — that's always your call.

You can shape the drafts in chat:

Keep replies short, one or two sentences. Don't sign off with "Best regards." Just my first name.

That instruction sticks, and the next Brief reflects it.

Push action items to your task app

If you live in Todoist or Things 3 — or TickTick, Asana, ClickUp, Linear, or Trello — Email Brief can optionally push every Needs your reply and Needs action item straight into your task app, so the work shows up where you already manage your day.

When you set it up, you tell the workflow which app to push to and (optionally) which project or list to file under. From then on, every Brief does this in the same pass:

• A reply that needs sending becomes a task like Reply: Anna L. — Q3 deck review with the Gmail link in the notes.
• A non-reply action becomes a task phrased imperatively — Verify Stripe tax info by May 24 — with a due date when the email mentions one.
• Each item in the Brief gets a small → Todoist marker (or whichever app you chose) so you can see at a glance what was pushed.

Apps that only live on your Mac — Things 3 being the obvious one — go through Agency Link. Install the menu-bar app, add the Things 3 MCP server from its library, and your agent picks up add-todo as a tool the same way it uses Gmail or Calendar. Email Brief then creates Things tasks directly, with the Gmail link in the notes and a due date when one's mentioned — no email forwarding hop, no inbox bouncing.

If you don't run Agency Link, Things 3's built-in "add-to-inbox" email address works as a fallback: configure it once in Things, paste the address into your agent, and Briefs forward each task there. The Brief flags any item it couldn't push so nothing falls through silently.

Leave the field blank and nothing changes — the Brief stays a self-contained report.

What it isn't

Email Brief isn't a chief of staff. It won't telepathically learn your most important relationships on day one — the drafts get sharper as you correct them. It also isn't a separate product. No subscription, no extra login, no second inbox to check. It uses the Gmail connection your agent already has, and each Brief lives alongside all your other reports in The Agency.

FAQs

Does it ever send email on my behalf? No. Drafts only. Your agent writes the reply and leaves it in Gmail Drafts; you decide whether to send.

What happens if it archives something important? Every archived thread is listed in the Brief with a clickable Gmail link and tagged with your recovery label. Click the link, drag it back to your inbox, done.

Can I change the schedule? Yes. The default is 7am and 2pm, but you can edit times from the workflow's detail page. Some people run it once a day, others every few hours.

Does this work with Outlook? Built and tested for Gmail. Outlook isn't tested yet.

Is my email data copied anywhere? Your agent reads messages through your existing Gmail connection in the moment. The Brief itself stores the summaries it produced (so you can scroll back through past Briefs), but the full message contents stay in Gmail.

If you've been on the inbox treadmill for years, give it a try. It's in the workflows library under Email. Two minutes to set up, and by tomorrow morning your inbox will be reading itself.