I automated my morning email routine with Claude AI to save hours every week

Published Jul 23, 2026, 8:45 AM EDT Adam has a degree in Engineering and has a life-long interest in technology. He has been writing for over a decade for various print and online publications, with a focus on consumer tech. He joined How-To Geek in 2024 while working at Pocket-lint. As well as being a long-term fan of Apple products, he also has a strong interest in smart home tech, running a Home Assistant server at home to automate all his smart home devices. He believes that the ideal smart home should work with minimal interaction from the user, with automations running as if by magic rather than requiring you to push buttons on a control panel. You can find more of his work on Muck Rack. What I want from AI is for it to take the boring and mundane jobs off my hands and free me up to do more fun stuff. Reading my emails before starting work each day is time-consuming and dull, so I decided to hand the task off to Claude. Starting every morning by checking my inbox was wasting time Admin was stopping me from getting on with work Credit: Justin Duino / How-To Geek Every morning started the same way. I'd sit down at my desk in my home office, open my emails, and read through them all. Some of them would be important ones that let me know about tasks I needed to complete that day, while others were pointless promotions or things that weren't urgent. I would regularly waste the first 15 or 20 minutes of my workday reading through emails when I could have been getting on with work. Over the course of a week, that could add up to well over an hour lost to reading emails. That's an hour I could have spent doing something more interesting, like working through my ever-growing backlog of video games I still haven't finished. I wondered if I could save myself some time by getting AI to do the boring part for me. Instead of reading my emails myself, maybe Claude could take over the job. Claude Cowork can check your email on a schedule The Gmail connector lets Claude read my email even before I do AI chatbots are pretty insane. We've already come to take them for granted, but if you stop to think for a second about what they can do, it's pretty mind-blowing. What a chatbot can do on its own is nothing compared to what it can do when combined with other tools. Claude has a large selection of connectors that you can use to hook the AI up to other apps and services. Claude can then interact with those apps and services on your behalf. There are connectors for popular apps such as Google Drive, Canva, Notion, Microsoft 365, Slack, Spotify, and more. Thankfully for my needs, there's also a Gmail connector. By setting up this connector and signing into my work Gmail account, Claude can not only search through and read emails, but it can also draft messages if given the relevant permissions. Once connected, I was able to ask Claude to summarize my emails and surface anything that needed to be done today or in the next few days. The results were excellent; Claude generated a very useful summary of my emails and prioritized the most important tasks in the response. Having to run this prompt manually every day wasn't ideal, however. I didn't want to have to ask Claude the same thing at the same time every morning. That's where scheduled tasks can help. Scheduled tasks in Claude Cowork will run automatically at the times you specify, following the instructions that you set up in the task. You can set up a scheduled task to run at 7 AM every day, for example, that reads your emails and provides a summary of your most important tasks. I didn't even have to write the scheduled task instructions The scheduled task was set up for me The best part was that I didn't even need to set up the scheduled task myself. I could have manually created a scheduled task, chosen a time for it to run, and entered some custom instructions asking Claude Cowork to check my email for me. That all sounded like far too much work. Instead, I simply explained to Claude what I wanted: a scheduled task that would run every weekday at 7 AM and would look at my email every morning so that I knew what to do at the start of each day. That was all I entered as my prompt. Claude then set up the Gmail connector for me to authorize, created the scheduled task, and wrote clear instructions to follow each time it runs. The results were just what I wanted, but if they hadn't been, I would only have needed to tweak the scheduled task instructions. Now I start the day by opening Claude and reading the digest. It takes maybe a minute at most, after which I can get on with the real work. I wouldn't use this with my personal email Letting AI access personal details isn't ideal Credit: Adam Davidson / How-To Geek There is a significant issue with this setup. It only works by allowing Claude to have complete read access to my Gmail account, and if you allow it (which I didn’t), the ability to write emails, too. Claude reading your emails means that potentially sensitive email content is processed by Anthropic’s systems rather than remaining entirely within your Google account. I set this up for my work email account, which is only used for work purposes. I wouldn't do the same with my personal email account, because I really don't want Anthropic having access to all my personal emails. It should be possible to use a local LLM to do a similar job if you are concerned about sharing your emails. The quality of the results will depend on the size and quality of the LLM that you can run on your hardware. AI is great for the repetitive stuff While you can ask AI chatbots about anything and everything, they're also really useful for handling repetitive tasks. Claude now takes this tedious job off my hands, and it's freed up some of my time, which can only be a good thing.