Read everything you need to know about your day in your 30 minute personalized briefing. See your calendar, know the weather, read through your notes, bookmarked tweets, and articles from your reading list. Brief compiles all of this into a timeboxed digest, allowing you to stay on top of what you want to know.
With Brief, you can focus on actually reading through the content. Nothing prompts an action, there's no constantly updating feed. If you feel that something warrants further attention, you can create highlights, notes, and todos.
Import notes and highlights from Readwise, or export your todos and annotations to Notion, Craft, or Things.
While most use Brief to start off their morning, you may prefer to unwind with Brief in the evening and get ready for the next day. Customize the time of your Brief, and the duration (based on your reading speed).
Brief provides a simple API interface to add any content you would like to see in your briefing. It works great with tools like Make or Zapier to extend its functionality.
I am building Brief because I always liked the idea of starting my day with a newspaper and a good cup of coffee. But I soon realized that the newspaper didn’t fit with my information diet—too many articles, while interesting, were not relevant to me in that moment. Meanwhile, my reading list compiled through articles discovered on Twitter, or through recommendations from friends, just kept growing.
Substituting the newspaper for Twitter and email newsletters felt overwhelming, and more than once sent me doomscrolling or down endless rabbit holes. Meanwhile, articles still kept piling up, because it was “never the right time” to read them.
And, of course, neither solution included any relevant personal content, such as my calendar or notes and highlights. So I ended up building Brief for myself, and hope that others find the tool useful, as well.