Find the tasks in your email, calendar and Slack before you plan your day

Sai reads unread and starred Gmail, recent calendar events, and Slack DMs, then returns a single briefing of what needs doing, ranked by urgency. It takes no outgoing actions — nothing is sent, replied to, or written to any other system.

% success ·

340

runs

The template

Copy prompt

Here's what you'll do: Pull my unread emails from Gmail, my starred emails, and my sent emails from the last 3 days for cross-referencing. Pull my calendar events from the last 3 days. Pull my Slack DMs from the last 3 days. Then produce a single daily briefing with: 1. A short inventory of what you read — counts per source, and any source that returned nothing (say so explicitly rather than omitting it). 2. Action items extracted from all three sources. For each one record: what needs doing, who is responsible, the source it came from, and a deadline ONLY if a date was stated. Never infer a deadline. 3. Urgency ranking. Rank the action items by urgency and state the basis for each ranking — a stated deadline, an explicit request, or a thread that has gone unanswered. Do not assign urgency without a basis. 4. Items requiring no action, listed separately so I can see they were read and dismissed. Where a thread is ambiguous, open it and read further before classifying it rather than guessing from the subject line. Take no outgoing actions: send nothing, reply to nothing, write to no sheet or external system. Write the briefing to a local file and confirm at the end that nothing was sent.

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Details

What you need

A connected Gmail account and Google Calendar. Slack is optional — if no workspace is connected, the run continues and reports Slack as unavailable rather than failing.

What you get back

A briefing file listing action items from all three sources, each with an owner, a source, and a deadline where one was stated, ranked by urgency with the basis given. Items requiring no action are listed separately. Sources that returned nothing are named.

How long it takes

The example run completed in two segments — a 5-step collection pass in 50 seconds and a 9-step analysis pass in 1 minute 20 seconds — over 32 unread emails, 5 starred emails, 8 sent emails and 1 calendar event. Runtime scales with the number of threads that need opening: threads classified from the subject line are fast, ambiguous ones are opened and read.

Make it recurring

Schedule it for 8am so the briefing is ready before the first meeting. A 3-day lookback on a daily schedule overlaps deliberately — items raised on Friday still appear on Monday.

What AI task management tools do

The category covers two functions.

The first is scheduling. Motion and Reclaim take a list of tasks and place them into calendar slots, adjusting when meetings move.

The second is task processing. Asana Intelligence, ClickUp Brain, Notion AI and Todoist AI Assistant operate on tasks already in the system — summarizing status, breaking work into subtasks, drafting descriptions, flagging what looks at risk.

Both operate on tasks that already exist as records. The step that creates the record is manual.

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Where tasks originate

Commitments are made in conversation before they exist as tasks.

A reply agreeing to send figures by Thursday creates an obligation. A meeting where a follow-up is assigned creates one. A Slack DM asking for a review creates one. Each becomes a managed task only if someone opens the task manager and types it in.

The tasks in a task manager are the ones that were remembered and entered. Items that were not entered do not appear in any prioritization, because prioritization runs over the list.

This task reads the sources where commitments are made and extracts the items from them.

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What it reads

Three sources over a 3-day window.

Gmail — unread and starred messages, plus sent messages. Sent mail is included for cross-referencing: it records what was agreed to, and identifies which threads were already answered.

Google Calendar — recent events, for follow-ups attached to meetings that have already happened.

Slack — direct messages, where requests are made without a paper trail.

The example run reported its inventory before analyzing: 32 unread emails, 5 starred emails, 8 sent emails, 1 calendar event, and Slack not connected, with the reason stated — no workspace found.

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Sources that return nothing are named

A source that fails silently produces an incomplete briefing that reads as complete.

In the example run, Slack was not connected. The run continued and reported it: "Slack DMs couldn't be included — no Slack workspace is connected to Sai, so slack.orgs() returned empty."

The briefing therefore represents Gmail and Calendar, and says so. The absence is visible rather than absorbed.

Approach	Finds tasks you never wrote down	Reads Slack DMs	Deadlines only if stated	Tracks task state over time	Best for
Motion / Reclaim	No Schedules an existing list	No	Partly Estimates durations	Yes	Fitting known work into a calendar
Asana / ClickUp / Notion AI	No Operates on entered tasks	Partly Slack integration creates tasks manually	Yes User-entered	Yes Primary function	Managing work already captured
Todoist AI / Gmail tasks	Partly One email at a time, on click	No	Yes	Yes	Converting a specific email into a task
Reading it all yourself	Yes Source is read directly	Yes	Yes	No Held in memory	Low volume
Sai — Daily Communication Briefing	Yes Reads all three sources	Yes Names it if unavailable	Yes Never inferred	No No state between runs	Surfacing tasks before they are entered

How action items are recorded

Each item carries four fields: what needs doing, who is responsible, which source it came from, and a deadline where one was stated.

Deadlines are taken from dates stated in the source. Items with no stated date are marked as not specified rather than assigned an estimate, because an inferred date cannot be distinguished from a stated one once written down.