In This Article
Introduction
Peter Steinberger built OpenClaw to be "the AI that actually does things for you." Not the AI you visit when you have a question. Not the AI that helps you while you're at your computer. The AI that works while you're asleep, while you're at the gym, while you're in meetings — monitoring your world, capturing information, taking defined actions, and surfacing what needs your attention exactly when you need it.
This is a guide to using OpenClaw in its highest-value mode: as a genuine personal assistant that runs 24/7, knows your context, and manages the administrative layer of your life so you can focus on what matters. These aren't theoretical capabilities — they're documented use cases from community members who've built these workflows over months of daily use.
Morning Briefings
The morning briefing is the most widely configured OpenClaw workflow. Before you reach for your phone, your agent has been working for hours — and has everything you need to know waiting in a structured, easy-to-digest message.
A well-designed morning briefing arrives at exactly your wake-up time (configure this in HEARTBEAT.md) and covers:
- Weather: Current conditions and forecast for your location, with specific notes if the weather affects your plans ("Your outdoor meeting at 2 PM might be affected by afternoon rain")
- Calendar: Today's meetings and commitments, with the most important context for each (who you're meeting, what you last discussed, any preparation needed)
- Priority email: A summary of emails that arrived overnight, filtered by importance — not every email, just the ones that genuinely require your attention before work starts
- News: A briefing on stories relevant to your interests or professional field — not generic news, but specifically what matters to you based on your stored preferences
- Tasks: Today's most important action items, including any overdue items from previous days
- Metrics: For business owners, a quick snapshot of overnight business metrics — orders, signups, revenue
This replaces the 20–30 minutes most people spend reading through apps and emails while still in bed, trying to figure out what the day holds. With a good briefing, you know in 3 minutes. You get to start the day with intention rather than reactive app-checking.
Managing Daily Tasks
OpenClaw integrates with task management tools (Todoist, Things, TickTick, Notion) through Skills, and can also maintain its own lightweight task system in memory files. The value isn't in replacing your existing task management — it's in making the system proactive rather than passive.
A passive task system (Todoist, Things) stores your tasks. You check it when you remember to. Tasks due today appear in the due-date view if you remember to open the app. Overdue tasks accumulate if you don't review.
An OpenClaw-integrated task system actively manages your attention. The agent knows what's due today and mentions it when relevant. It spots tasks that are approaching deadlines and alerts you before it's an emergency. It notices when you haven't made progress on a weekly goal and checks in. The tasks come to you rather than waiting for you to remember to go look at them.
Configure a task management heartbeat:
# In HEARTBEAT.md
## Daily Task Management
### Morning (7:30 AM)
- [ ] Review today's tasks in Todoist. Identify the 3 most important ones and
include them prominently in the morning briefing. Note any overdue tasks.
### Afternoon check-in (2:00 PM on weekdays)
- [ ] Check task completion progress. If I have not completed any morning tasks,
send a brief check-in: "Afternoon check-in: you had [X tasks] this morning.
How are you tracking?"
### Evening (6:00 PM)
- [ ] Compile tasks completed today. Prep tomorrow's top 3 priorities and
include in the evening briefing.
Information Monitoring
A personal assistant that knows what you care about monitors the information landscape on your behalf, surfacing what's relevant and filtering what isn't. OpenClaw's information monitoring capabilities:
Industry news: Configure the agent to monitor RSS feeds, specific websites, or news APIs for developments in your professional field. Instead of subscribing to 15 newsletters and spending 45 minutes reading them, receive a daily synthesis of what actually matters for your work, with commentary on why each item is relevant to your specific situation.
Company and competitor tracking: Monitor news, job postings, funding announcements, and social media activity for companies you care about — your employer, your company, key customers, important competitors. "Alert me if [competitor] announces a new product in our category or raises funding."
Market and financial monitoring: Track investments, market conditions, or economic indicators you care about. Proactive alerts when thresholds are crossed; daily summaries for regular tracking.
Personal interests: Monitor availability of tickets to events you want to attend, price changes on products you're watching, updates from creators you follow. The agent becomes an always-on alert system for the things that matter to you personally.
Travel & Administrative Tasks
Administrative tasks — booking flights, managing expenses, renewing subscriptions, handling paperwork — consume time and cognitive overhead disproportionate to their actual importance. OpenClaw excels at these tasks because they're information-heavy, pattern-driven, and time-consuming for humans but manageable for an agent with browser access.
Travel management is one of the highest-value areas. A configured travel agent workflow:
- Monitors your calendar for upcoming trips and reminds you to book accommodations and transportation with appropriate lead time
- Checks in for flights at the optimal time (24 hours before) and sends confirmation with your boarding pass link
- Monitors flight status the day of travel and alerts you to delays or gate changes
- Compiles packing suggestions based on destination, weather forecast, and meeting schedule
- Creates trip expense files that you update during the trip and that the agent compiles into an expense report afterward
Administrative tasks the agent handles well: renewing expiring subscriptions (the agent monitors expiry dates in memory and reminds you 30 days before), managing document deadlines (passport renewal, insurance review, license renewal), and tracking deliveries (monitoring order confirmation emails and delivery status).
Evening Review & Planning
The evening review is the bookend to the morning briefing — a moment of structured reflection and next-day preparation that most people know they should do and most people rarely actually do. OpenClaw makes it automatic:
At a configured time each evening, the agent sends a brief review:
- Tasks completed today (pulled from task management integration)
- Tasks carried forward to tomorrow
- Anything that happened today that should be noted for future reference (meetings that produced important decisions, commitments made, things learned)
- Tomorrow's key events and necessary preparation
- One optional reflection prompt ("What went particularly well today? What would you do differently?")
The reflection prompt is optional and many users skip it — but for those who use it, it creates a lightweight journaling habit with almost zero friction. Responding to the agent's evening prompt takes 2 minutes; it's the kind of reflection practice that's valuable but chronically deprioritized when done as a separate task.
Building Your Setup
Building a personal assistant setup that you'll actually use requires starting small and expanding based on what provides real value in your specific workflow:
Week 1: Set up morning briefings only. Get the weather, calendar, and email summary working smoothly. This alone provides immediate value and builds the habit of checking the agent each morning.
Week 2: Add one monitoring task relevant to your work. If you're in finance, add a market monitoring task. If you're in tech, add industry news monitoring. Verify that the alerts you receive are genuinely useful (not too many, not too few).
Week 3: Connect your task management tool and enable task integration in the morning briefing. Tune the prioritization rules.
Week 4+: Add evening review. Connect any other systems that are relevant to your specific workflow. Add one new monitoring task or administrative automation per week based on where you're experiencing friction.
The community's consistent experience: the setups that provide the most value after 3 months are those that were grown incrementally, with each addition based on real friction points, rather than set up comprehensively on day one and rarely revised.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much do I need to interact with the agent each day? The minimum is zero — a well-configured HEARTBEAT.md means the agent does its work autonomously and only contacts you when it has something to share. Most users send 5–15 messages per day for additional tasks, requests, or quick questions beyond the automated workflows.
Will the agent remember things I mention in passing? Yes, if you configure it to. The system prompt can include: "If I mention a preference, upcoming event, or commitment in conversation, add it to the appropriate memory file for future reference." With this enabled, "I'm flying to Chicago next Tuesday" updates your travel context in memory automatically.
What if the briefing contains inaccurate information? Verify important information (particularly specific numbers, dates, or facts) against primary sources. The agent occasionally generates plausible-sounding but incorrect details. For high-stakes decisions, treat the briefing as a starting point for verification, not as a verified source.
How does the agent know what counts as "important" email? It learns from your system prompt instructions and from observed patterns over time. Configure initial importance signals: "Email from these domains is always high priority: [list]. Email with subject lines containing these words is high priority: [list]. All other email is low priority unless it has keywords suggesting urgency." Refine over the first few weeks as you encounter false positives and false negatives.
Wrapping Up
A properly configured OpenClaw personal assistant setup is one of those productivity investments that pays back every day, compounding over time as the agent learns your context and your workflows improve. The morning briefing alone — giving you an intentional, structured start rather than reactive app-checking — creates measurable value. Add information monitoring, task integration, administrative automation, and evening review, and the cumulative time savings and cognitive overhead reduction are substantial. The key is starting simple, tuning based on real experience, and expanding incrementally as each addition proves its value.