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.

Something had to change.

The Problem with Information Overload

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.

Building a Better Morning Routine

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 had another thought.

The Evolution: Notes and the 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. But then I took it further.

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.

This is where the magic happens. The council often stimulates new discussions and ideas that I carry with me throughout the day.

The Final Touches

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.

But here's the best part: 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.

What This Taught Me

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

The tools are there. The AI models are powerful enough. 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, consider this: what would your perfect morning briefing look like? What would it include? What perspective would it offer?

Then go build it.

Thanks for reading. Here's to starting each day with exactly what you need to hear.