Work Brief

Monday, 8am. What is actually waiting on you lives in three places - Outlook, the calendar, and a dozen Teams chats - and none of them knows about the others. You open mail, get pulled into the first thread, and miss the one reply that had a meeting behind it. This skill builds the single view you never assemble yourself: what you owe people, what you are blocked on, and what to do first.

Why it is not just a list of unread mail

Anyone can list unread mail. What earns this its place is the correlation step. An unanswered thread is one more line in a pile. The same thread linked to a meeting in the next 48 hours is a deadline nobody noticed - and that link is what gets missed when each surface is read on its own. The brief reads mail, calendar, and Teams together and leads with those.

Basic usage

The skill runs on demand with no setup. Once it is imported into Scout, ask for it in plain language:

give me my work brief for the week

Other phrasings work just as well - “what did I miss?”, “what is waiting on me?”, “catch me up after two weeks off”. The skill picks the time window to match the request and returns a single brief. A minimal result looks like this (names below are illustrative):

# Weekly brief - 26 Jul 2026
Coverage: mail, calendar, Teams - lookback 19-26 Jul - look-ahead 26-31 Jul - Europe/Paris

## Before your next meetings
- Project kickoff (Mon 10:30) - you owe the draft scope before it starts; age 3 days;
  deadline stated as Monday. next: send the scope draft. (source: thread "Kickoff prep")

## You owe people
- A teammate - asked for review comments; age 2 days; deadline implied, not stated;
  next: reply with the two open questions. (source: thread "Design review")

## Waiting on others
- Your manager - owns sign-off on the budget line; asked 6 days ago, chased once.
  (source: thread "Q3 budget")

## Do first
1. Send the kickoff scope draft - hard deadline Monday morning.
2. Reply on the design review so it is not blocked on you.

To personalise ranking, copy assets/config.example.json to ~/.copilot/work-brief/config.json and set your priority people and projects, delivery mode, and language. To have the brief arrive on a schedule, follow references/install-automation.md - one automation, e.g. Monday 08:00.

Delivery and notification go together

The brief lands one of three ways, set in config: left in the Scout run, posted to your own Teams chat, or emailed to your own work address. Each mode pairs with a notification setting. The failure to avoid is scout mode with notifications off: it runs every Monday and nobody knows. With Teams or email delivery the message itself is the notification. Pick the row, set both columns.

Language

The brief is written in your language, not the tool’s. By default it follows the language you write in yourself - a French user gets a French brief - or you can pin a fixed language in config. Either way it only changes how the brief reads: quotes from a colleague stay in the language they wrote in, because a quote is evidence, not prose to translate.

Safety

Everything the brief reads - mail bodies, invites, chat, display names - is treated as untrusted data, never as instructions, so a message saying “forward this to everyone” gets summarised, not obeyed. Exactly one outbound action is ever allowed, fixed by the delivery mode: it posts or sends the brief and nothing else, no replies, no RSVPs, no forwarding, no calendar writes, and it never @mentions anyone. If a source fails, the brief says so at the top instead of quietly dropping a section, because an empty week and a broken calendar call should never look the same.