Last week you set up a morning digest. This week we raise the bar with a rule about what deserves an agent at all, and a recipe that shows the difference at work: an agent that preps you for every meeting on your calendar.
One idea: the macro test
Here is a filter worth keeping for the rest of your agent-running life: if a script could do the job, it is not a job for an agent. Checking whether a number changed, renaming files, forwarding a form response somewhere: automation solved those twenty years ago. Handing them to an AI agent is using a sharp assistant as an alarm clock.
The jobs worth an agent are the ones that need reading and judgment. Deciding which of forty items actually matter to you. Writing something in your tone. Noticing that two unrelated updates, together, mean something changed. This is work you would hand to a good chief of staff, and until now it belonged only to people who had one.
The most universal piece of chief-of-staff work is meeting prep. Everyone knows walking in briefed changes the meeting. Almost nobody does the twenty minutes of digging per meeting it takes. It is judgment all the way down: who is this person, what do they want, what changed since we last spoke, what should I ask. That is this week's agent.
One recipe: the meeting-prep agent
The job: every morning, a short brief for each external meeting on your calendar, before your coffee is done.
Step 1. Give it read-only sight of your schedule. Two ways in, and the quick one counts: paste tomorrow's meetings into the chat and the agent works from that. For the always-on version, create a Google service account with read-only calendar access, share your calendar with it, and store its key in your platform's encrypted vault, which injects it into this one agent and nothing else. You pick read-only at Google, and it is the part that matters. An agent that can only read cannot accept, decline, or move anything, so the worst it can do is brief you badly.
Step 2. Give your agent these instructions.
Every weekday at 7am, look at my calendar for today and tomorrow. If you cannot reach my calendar, use the meetings I pasted in chat instead. For each meeting with people from outside my company, prepare a brief: who I am meeting and their role, what their company does and anything notable about it from the last month, what we last discussed if the invite thread mentions it, and three questions worth asking in this specific meeting. Keep each brief under 200 words. Send all briefs in one message, ordered by meeting time. If a meeting has no outside attendees, skip it. If you cannot find anything genuinely useful about someone, say that in one line instead of padding the brief. Never contact anyone, and never change anything on the calendar.
Notice where the judgment lives. "Anything notable" is a decision. "Three questions worth asking in this specific meeting" is the part that makes people ask how you do it. And "say that instead of padding" is the honesty rule from issue 1, which will be in every recipe this newsletter ever prints, because a confident-sounding empty brief is worse than none.
Step 3. Home, schedule, channel. Same as last week: always-on home, morning schedule, delivered where you already read messages. One thing catches people out: schedules run in UTC, so convert your 7am or the briefs land at lunch. To skip the blank page, the Meeting Preparation Agent template already carries the schedule and the format. A brief that arrives after the meeting is trivia.
Step 4. Watch what happens in the room. Success sentence: this agent is working if, two weeks from now, I have not walked into a single external meeting cold. Then notice the second-order effect: colleagues clock the person who always arrives knowing the other side's last announcement. When someone asks how you do it, you have your answer ready. That is how these tools spread through a team, one visibly prepared person at a time.
From the fleet
This week's question: which meeting in the last month would have gone differently if you had walked in briefed? Hit reply with one sentence. I read every answer, and the jobs that come up most often become recipes in this email.
Deploy your first agent free, start from the Meeting Preparation template, paste the instructions, and let Monday's meetings meet a more prepared you.
See you next Friday, David