The daily question
What should I work on?
That is the whole briefing. Not a wall of everything overdue — one answer, weighed fresh each time you ask, because an overdue count does not tell you what to do about it. It just confirms what you already suspected on the way to your desk.
A count is not an answer.
Ask a tracker what is overdue and it gives you a number. Ask again tomorrow and the number is roughly the same one, because most of what was overdue yesterday is still overdue today — you were doing other things, and the count does not know that. It is real. It is also useless on its own: it does not say which of those tasks matters most, or whether today is even the day to touch them.
So the briefing does not lead with the count. It leads with a ranked answer, and the count is one input among several, not the headline.
Four signals, weighed together.
get_today_briefing pulls what is overdue, what is
due today, what is already in flight, and what has stalled with
no status change — then adds a load-per-day curve for the days
ahead, so a pile-up two Thursdays from now is visible before it
arrives.
Days are measured in the workspace's own timezone, not a server clock's idea of midnight. A task due at 11pm in Chicago does not go overdue three hours early because a machine somewhere else thinks the day already ended. Due today is not called late — the boundary is yours.
Real output, this account, 2026-08-18
- Overdue118 tasks, oldest since April.
- Due today1 task.
- In flight10 tasks, already started.
- Stalled175 tasks, no status change in 14+ days.
This is what it returned, called while writing this page.
Not a screenshot, not a sample account. This is a trimmed, real response from the same tool Claude calls, against the one account that exists.
$ get_today_briefing
{
"today": "2026-08-18",
"timezone": "America/Chicago",
"overdue": { "count": 118 },
"due_today": { "count": 1 },
"in_flight": { "count": 10 },
"stalled": { "threshold_days": 14, "count": 175 }
}
Task titles are trimmed out of the block above on purpose — some of what is overdue is ordinary marketing follow-up, and some of it names a client by name. The counts are the honest part; the row titles are not this page's to publish.
The whole pipeline is much larger than today's answer.
Across every workspace, there are 506 tasks tracked and 211 completed. The briefing never shows that number, because it is not the question. Knowing there are 295 things not yet done tells you nothing about which one to touch this afternoon.
506
Tasks tracked
211
Completed
Nothing runs on a schedule. This is pulled, never pushed.
The same real response above reports since_yesterday
as zero across meetings, notes, ideas, signals, decisions and
shipped work, with zero alerts fired. That is not a claim about
how quiet the day was — it is what "nothing pushes" looks like
from the inside. There is no digest email, no notification, no
background job checking in on you. You ask, in the conversation
you are already having, or the briefing does not happen at all.
Today answers what is due and in flight. Loops answers a different question — what was decided or noticed and never followed up on, which the day's schedule does not surface at all.