Before I built this I was opening my mailbox 5 or 6 times a day. The first time the system read one of those mailboxes properly, it found 326 real threads buried under the subscriptions.
This morning the report was on my phone when I picked it up, one page, everything I needed to know before the day started. I had not opened a mailbox or a calendar to make that happen. Everything behind that page runs on files I can read myself. Together, by my own estimate, it gives me back about 10 hours a week.
I always had concerns that in those huge amount of incoming mails, I might lose important information that it will be buried amongst all those free subscription emails, promos and spam. It’s already unbearable to open mailbox expecting to see several dozens of emails every single day and check it several times per day. I always had to go through all of them trying to understand if something important has come or not. The mental pressure started feeling unbearable.
I call what I built my chief of staff. It has 4 jobs.
Job 1: the morning report
The page opens with what is waiting on me, the things sitting still because I have not done my part, then the top 3 for today, then what is due today. Everything else is further down and most mornings I never scroll.
Claude checks all incoming channels: all e-mail addresses, calendars, voice capture notes from SayOnce (more about it below), each project folder. When i work in project I do not need to think what Claude should remember, LLM does it automatically and often surprises me with how granular the captured actions are.
Every Monday morning is the time for a weekly report, which track all KPIs I set: contacts, leads, contracts, post, etc. There I also see the key actions I need to take to make this week successful.
If I cannot work on the laptop this morning, Claude also uploads report to Google Drive and I read it on my iPhone. Google Drive is also used to keep Claude chat on my iPhone up to date on all projects (Claude app on iPhone and Claude Code do not share the same memory yet).
Job 2: the mail
The mail is read twice a day, at 06:47 and again at 19:07, across all 3 of my Gmail accounts. I had the perception, and I saw it in several videos, that it is impossible to connect several Gmails to Claude. And that for that we need Composio. The perception was wrong. The way around it came out of a working session: Claude works inside the Chrome window I am already signed into, and one Chrome window holds all 3 accounts at once. In that first pass it swept 19 senders, unsubscribed from 9 of them by clicking through the links itself, and stopped at 5 pop-ups that only my own click can get past.
After its first full day running without me: We did a lot of unsubscribe actions. And again, it was done by Claude, not by me. So a lot of my time was saved. Secondly, I didn’t open Gmail. I read the report. And when I saw that there is nothing that requires my attention, I didn’t open emails at all. I just did that during the day once time just to see, and all mailboxes were very calm and empty.
I think the caveat here is that you have full access to Chrome. And it brings certain risks that Claude can, for example, send emails without me knowing. That’s why in the access rights, you have to be very careful what you give access to.
Important lesson from this stage was that it is always worth to ask Claude, sometimes ask twice to find a better solution to any problem.
Job 3: meetings and links
The brief for a call is written the night before, read across the same 3 accounts. And a page I bookmarked and forgot comes back in the morning report under links for today, filed with the project it came from.
In addition Claude looks after my desktop and download folder, moving all files to the respective folders at the wrap-up every evening. How does Claude know which files belong to which folders? I set a rule in claude.md that all files it generates should have a certain name structure: always start with the name of the project, then the subject of the file, then today’s date.
When I work on any topic, I just ask Claude which info it has already stored on this subject and what could be useful for me to see in this particular moment. It was finally the solution for my bad habit of saving the links in Chrome or in Bookmarks. Not only the Chrome window would be polluted with 50 open tabs, but I never remembered what I stored and where to find it. Now at the end of the day, all open tabs are saved and Chrome window is closed by Claude.
Job 4: the thing I say on the way to the car
I come out of a meeting and walk to the car with something in my head that I promised somebody. I press one button on my phone, say the sentence out loud, and keep walking. I do not tag it or decide which project it belongs to.
The next morning that sentence is in my report, under the right project, next to the work it belongs with. That is SayOnce, that I built to address my needs and get rid of endless post-it notes and to-do lists on paper.
In Part 2 this lane needed an iPhone Shortcut that turns your speech into text, stamps it with the time and emails it to yourself, plus a label and a filter in Gmail so the system can find those emails again. It works and I ran it for weeks.
SayOnce is much simpler solution, that not only saves your notes, but sorts them and allocates to your projects. You download it, press the button and speak, and what you said comes back as organised items you can ask questions of. It is free to start.
The app is the capture and it is connected to the morning brief, which runs by Claude on the laptop. From there the tasks are allocated to projects folders and are tracked on a daily basis.
The brain is files I can read
Everything this system knows sits in ordinary text files on my own computer. I can double-click any of them and read the whole thing in TextEdit, with no app to install and nothing to log into. But I rarely do that. This is Claude’s responsibility and it manages my files much better than i do. If i need to find something or change something, i just say so in plain English.
Sometimes I just open a new Claude Code chat and just say all what I have in my head. I ask Claude to sort it, allocate to projects and start solving or propose a plan.
The full setup takes around 40-45 min and you need to do it only once. You can check more details in Part 2.
Chief of Staff OS is your memory and brain, which knows and keeps everything about everyone and everything. It’s your front desk to every single communication channel. It’s your reminders. It’s your peace of mind.
And the most important - a chief of staff acts: drafts the report before you ask for it, reads the email on a schedule, prepares the meeting the night before, and reminds you the thing you promised.
You don’t need Obsidian to create your personal operating system. And it much easier than you think.
Tomorrow at 06:47 the next report will be written.
Read the rest of the series: Building a personal OS with AI and How I build my AI OS.