How I built my own AI council to start every day

I used to subscribe to way too many newsletters. Each one had good insights, but reading through them every morning felt like wading through the same ideas dressed up in different words. I was spending an hour each day on information I could have absorbed in ten minutes, and the redundancy was killing me.

Too Many Newsletters

Like many people trying to stay informed, I'd accumulated subscriptions to every newsletter that promised to make me smarter about markets, productivity, and life. The problem wasn't the quality. Most of them were excellent. The problem was redundancy. Five different writers would cover the same news story, and I'd read essentially the same take five times.

I needed the insights without the repetition. So I did what any data analyst would do: I automated my way out of it.

The First Version

I started simple. I set up a Power Automate flow to save all my newsletter emails to files. Then I created an LLM prompt that could summarize each one while keeping the unique voice and perspective of each writer. No generic summaries. I wanted to preserve what made each newsletter worth reading in the first place.

Then I wrote another prompt to combine all these summaries into a single, cohesive news update. Since I care most about markets, I added a specific focus there. What used to take an hour now took five minutes to generate and ten minutes to read.

I used this system for a few months and loved it. But then I realized I could take it further.

Adding Notes and a Council

Why stop at newsletters? Every day I take notes: ideas, observations, things I want to remember. What if I could review yesterday's notes every morning as part of my briefing? I added that feature, and then I created what I call my "council of perspectives," different AI voices that give me advice on my notes and share their thoughts. One might approach things from a stoic philosophy angle. Another might focus on practical business strategy. Another on long-term thinking.

This council doesn't just repeat my thoughts back to me. They challenge them. They ask questions I didn't think to ask. They connect dots I didn't see. It's like having a morning conversation with advisors who've read everything I'm thinking about and want to push me further. The council often stimulates new discussions and ideas that I carry with me throughout the day.

Making It Complete

I wasn't done yet. I added a section for daily dad advice, short, practical wisdom about fatherhood. And some quotes to reflect on. I also included a brief Vancouver news section since local context matters to me.

The whole thing comes together as a personalized briefing that's exactly what I need to start my day informed and inspired. I set up a macro to automatically send this briefing to ElevenLabs Reader, which converts it to audio. Now I get my custom morning update as a podcast, delivered fresh every day.

Six Months Later

I've listened to my AI-generated morning briefing every single day for the last six months.

It's improved my life in ways I didn't expect. I'm more informed with less effort. I'm thinking about my own notes more critically. I'm getting perspectives I wouldn't have considered on my own. And I'm doing it all while I make my morning coffee and feed my son Flynn.

The beauty of this system isn't just the efficiency, though that's nice. It's the intentionality. I'm not passively consuming whatever lands in my inbox. I'm actively curating the information and perspectives that matter most to me, then having them delivered in exactly the format I need.

Why This Works

Building this system taught me that we don't have to accept the default way information comes to us. We can shape it, filter it, and combine it with our own thoughts to get perspectives that challenge us to grow.

The tools are there, the AI models are powerful enough, and the automation platforms are accessible enough. What's missing is just the willingness to spend a weekend building something that will save you hours every week and make those hours more valuable.

If you're drowning in newsletters, scattered notes, and generic news feeds, think about what your perfect morning briefing would look like. What would it include? What perspective would it offer? The system is pretty straightforward to build once you know what you want.