What I want from AI is to take away boring, mundane jobs and free me up to do more fun things. Reading my emails before starting work every day is time-consuming and boring, so I decided to entrust the task to Claude.
Starting every morning by checking my inbox was wasting time
The administrator prevented me from continuing with work.
Every morning started the same way. I would sit at my desk in my home office, open my emails, and read them all. Some of them would be important and tell me what tasks I needed to complete that day, while others would be useless promotions or things that weren’t urgent.
I regularly wasted the first 15 or 20 minutes of my workday reading emails when I could have gotten on with work. Over the course of a week, that could add up to more than an hour wasted reading emails. That’s an hour I could have spent doing something more interesting, like working on my growing backlog of video games that I haven’t finished yet.
I was wondering if I could save me some time making the AI do the boring part for me. Instead of reading my emails myself, maybe Claude could take over the work.
Claude Cowork can check his email on a schedule
Gmail Connector Lets Claude Read My Email Even Before Me
AI Chatbots They are pretty crazy. We already 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.
Claudio has a large selection of connectors that you can use to connect AI to other applications and services. Claude can then interact with those applications and services on your behalf. There are connectors for popular apps like Google Drive, Canva, NotionMicrosoft 365, lazy, Spotifyand more.
Fortunately for my needs, there is also a Gmail connector. By setting up this connector and logging into my work Gmail account, Claude can not only search and read emails, but can also compose messages if given the appropriate permissions.
Once connected, I was able to ask Claude to summarize my emails and show everything 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 answer.
However, having to run this message manually every day was not ideal. He didn’t want to have to ask Claude the same thing at the same time every morning.
That’s where scheduled tasks can help. Tasks scheduled in Claude Cowork will run automatically at the times you specify, following the instructions you set up in the task. You can set a scheduled task to run at 7am every day, for example, to read your emails and provide a summary of your most important tasks.
I didn’t even have to write the instructions for the scheduled task.
The scheduled task was set up for me.
The best part was that I didn’t even have to set up the scheduled task myself. You could have manually created a scheduled task, chosen a time to run it, and entered some custom instructions asking Claude Cowork to check my email for me.
All of that seemed like too much work. Instead, I simply explained to Claude what I wanted: a scheduled task that would run every weekday at 7 a.m. and check my email every morning to know what to do at the start of each day. That was all I entered as a message.
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 have only needed to modify the instructions of the scheduled task.
Now I start the day by opening Claude and reading the summary. It might take me a minute at most, after which I can get on with the real work.
I wouldn’t use this with my personal email.
Allowing AI to access personal data is not ideal
There is a major problem with this setup. It only works by allowing Claude full read access to my Gmail account and, if you allow it (which I didn’t), also the ability to write emails. Claude reading your emails means that potentially sensitive email content is processed by Anthropic systems instead of staying completely 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 to have access to all my personal emails.
It should be possible use a local LLM to do a similar job if you’re worried about sharing your emails. The quality of the results will depend on the size and quality of the LLM you get run on your hardware.
AI is great for repetitive things
While you can ask AI chatbots about anything, they are also very useful for Handling repetitive tasks.. Now Claude has taken this tedious job off my shoulders and freed up some of my time, which can only be a good thing.
