Weekly Business Digest: a Monday brief that reads your week

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Start Monday already knowing where things stand

Every week the same picture is scattered across four places: your calendar knows who you met, your inbox knows who is still waiting on you, a spreadsheet knows your numbers, and your memory is doing its best to hold it all together. By the time you've opened every tab and pieced it together, the morning is gone.

This kit is a read-only digest. Once a week it quietly looks at your calendar, your inbox, and one metrics source (a Google Sheet or CSV to start), and asks Claude to write you a single one-page brief: this week's meetings, the threads still awaiting your reply, your top numbers, and a plain-English what changed. It lands in your email or Telegram before you've had coffee.

Plain-English glossary, once: A digest is a short summary of a lot of stuff. Read-only means the kit can look but never touch: it never replies, deletes, moves money, or changes a calendar. A scheduled task (or "cron job") is just a program set to run on a clock, here, every Monday at 7am. Claude is the AI that reads the raw week and writes the brief. This is one of the safest, highest-leverage patterns there is: it only ever reports.

1

Point it at your week: three read-only sources

What's happening: The brief is only as good as what it can see, so you connect it to three things you already have. Each connection is read-only by design: you grant view access, nothing more. Your data never leaves your accounts; the kit pulls a copy, summarizes it, and forgets the rest.

Source	What it pulls	Access level
Calendar	This week's meetings: who, when, title	read-only
Inbox	Recent threads, and which ones are awaiting your reply	read-only
Metrics (Sheet/CSV)	The handful of numbers you watch (revenue, leads, etc.)	read-only

Why this keeps you safe: the kit requests the narrowest scope each provider offers (for Google, that's the read-only calendar and inbox scopes, not full access). It cannot send, delete, or edit anything, even if it wanted to: the permission to do so was never granted. Start with a Sheet or CSV for numbers so your first run touches nothing risky at all.

Your metrics file or Sheet link goes here (the setup wizard asks for this, not saved on this page)

↳ See the same read-only inbox idea in Inbox Triage →

2

Give it a brain: connect Claude

What's happening: The sources hand over raw rows: forty calendar events, a pile of email subjects, a column of numbers. Claude is what turns that noise into a brief a busy person can read in ninety seconds. The kit asks Claude for a structured digest (a typed object: meetings, awaiting-reply threads, key metrics, and a short what-changed), never loose prose, so the layout stays the same every week.

Go to console.anthropic.com and sign in.
Open API Keys → Create Key.
Copy the key (it starts with sk-ant-). The setup wizard saves it on your machine.

Your Claude API key goes here (in the kit's setup wizard)

Default brain: claude-opus-4-8 (sharpest). Want it cheaper? Set claude-haiku-4-5; a weekly run is tiny either way.

3

Shape the brief: tell it what a good Monday looks like

What's happening: You decide what belongs on the page. The kit ships with a plain config/digest.json where you list the metrics you care about, how many meetings and threads to surface, and the tone. Edit it freely; the brief follows it. A small slice of the sample that ships with the kit:

{
  "metrics": ["revenue", "new leads", "open invoices"],
  "max_meetings": 8,
  "max_awaiting_reply": 6,
  "tone": "plain, calm, no hype",
  "deliver_to": "telegram",   // or "email"
  "schedule": "Mon 07:00"
}

Still read-only. Nothing in this config can grant the kit the ability to act. The most it ever does is compose a brief and deliver that brief to you. It does not reply to email, accept meetings, or change a single number at the source. The sources stay the source of truth, untouched.

↳ Which numbers are worth watching? See AI ROI →

4

Try it: build a one-page digest, send nothing

What's happening: Pick a sample week. The kit takes that week's canned calendar, inbox, and numbers and assembles the exact one-page brief it would send: meetings, threads awaiting your reply, top metrics with week-over-week movement, and a plain-English what changed. Then it waits: it has drafted the brief but delivered nothing. This brief is live. Try it. It runs entirely in your browser, nothing is sent anywhere.

Weekly Digest · Northwind Studio (sample)

Pick a sample week to summarize:

Pure in-browser dry run: no API call, no fetch, no delivery, nothing saved.

5

Confirm before send, then put it on a schedule

What's happening: When you run it by hand, the kit shows you the brief and waits for a tap before delivering, the same confirm-before-send habit you've seen in the other kits. Once you trust it, you flip it to a scheduled task and it just shows up every Monday. The draft above is wired to exactly this. Try the buttons: they only show what would happen.

Three promises the kit keeps:
• It is entirely read-only: it reports, it never acts.
• Your sources stay in your accounts. The kit reads a copy and forgets it; it stores nothing.
• Nothing is delivered without a schedule you set or a tap you make. No surprise sends.

npm run dryrun     # build the brief in your terminal, deliver nothing
npm run digest     # build + deliver the brief once, right now
npm run schedule   # install the weekly cron job (Mon 07:00)
npm run mcp        # expose it as an MCP server (drive it from Claude)

A scheduled digest is one of the most useful patterns you can run: low risk (read-only), low cost (once a week), and it quietly buys back the first hour of your Monday. It's the same scheduled-task shape you can reuse for a daily standup, an end-of-month roll-up, or a quiet "anything on fire?" check.

6

Tune what lands: keep it to one page, keep it useful

What's happening: A brief nobody reads is worse than no brief. The kit keeps it ruthlessly short: a hard cap on meetings and threads, the few metrics you chose, and a single what-changed paragraph. If a week is quiet, the brief says so in two lines instead of padding. You tune the caps in the config until your Monday brief is the one thing you actually open.

Read-only, with a kill switch: the kit ships with DRY_RUN on. In dry-run it builds and renders the brief but the mailer and Telegram sender are gated off, so you can read several weeks of digests before a single real one is ever delivered.

Run it yourself: it's free and it's the real thing

The kit is a complete, runnable, MIT-licensed repo: read-only calendar and inbox pulls, a CSV or Sheet for numbers, a Claude-written one-page brief, and a one-line scheduler. Runs on your machine, nothing crippled. Run npm run setup and you're a week away from never piecing your Monday together by hand again.

Get the free kit on GitHub →

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Go live

With the kit downloaded:

npm install
npm run setup      # Claude key + read-only sources saved on YOUR machine
npm run dryrun     # build a brief, deliver nothing, read it in your terminal
npm run schedule   # turn on the weekly Monday run

Read a few dry-run briefs first. When the brief is one you'd actually want every Monday, run npm run schedule and forget about it. Prefer to drive it yourself? npm run digest builds and delivers one on demand, and it also runs as an MCP server (npm run mcp) so you can ask Claude for "this week's brief" the same idea from Lesson 1.

Want one brief that reads your whole business, for you and your leads?

This kit is the DIY taste: calendar, inbox, and a spreadsheet. We connect your real tools, your CRM, your accounting, your ops dashboards, into one brief and run it for you and your leads, so the right person opens Monday already knowing where the business stands. Still read-only. Still no surprise actions.

Have Rabbithole build it → ↳ Pair it with Inbox Triage