Needs attention
Overdue, due today, blocked, waiting and high priority — the things that will hurt if you miss them.
Your operational day in 250 words
Needs attention, today, waiting for, you promised, at risk — built from structured queries against your own records and written short enough to actually read.
On screen
Two hundred and fifty words, once a day
Not a feed and not a digest of everything. The brief is capped, and the cap is the point: it has to choose, which means reading it tells you what actually matters rather than what happened.
One line at the top. Open it if you want the rest.
TODAY · DAILY BRIEF
Two things need you today, and one of them is late.
Late. The Thursday rota has been with Sarah for two days. A follow-up is drafted and waiting.
Today. Maple Court are expecting the revised quote before close. Nothing is blocking it.
Quiet. Four items are waiting on other people and none are overdue yet. The vendor contract came back signed.
Written from your own actions and people. 218 words.
275
interruptions a day — roughly one every two minutes — once
meetings, email and notifications are counted together. The brief is
deliberately not one of them.
Microsoft, Work Trend Index special report, June 2025
The brief
Six sections, under 250 words, useful in 30 seconds
A daily brief that takes five minutes to read is a second inbox. The constraint is the feature.
Today
What's actually scheduled for the next few hours, in priority order.
Waiting for
What other people owe you, and how long it's been.
You promised
What you owe other people. The section most people find uncomfortable and most useful.
At risk
Work whose deadline and whose progress have stopped agreeing with each other.
Nothing invented
The brief is generated from structured queries against your records. If a section has nothing in it, it says so rather than filling space.
Why it can be trusted
Written from a query, not from a context window
The generation step never sees a pile of raw text and guesses what matters. It runs the same structured queries the app's own screens run, assembles a compact set of facts, and the model's only job is to phrase them.
That's a narrow job, and narrow jobs are where language models are reliable. It's also why the brief can't tell you about a deadline you never captured — and won't pretend to.
- Hard word budget. 250 words, so it stays scannable on a phone before your first meeting.
- Deterministic inputs. Same records, same brief — the numbers come from the database, not from a summary of a summary.
- Workspace-scoped. Like every other query in Zephyr, it can only see your own workspace's rows.
- Included in Preview. A basic brief is part of Preview; the full one is part of Plus.
On the phone
The screen you open at 7am
This is Today, and it is deliberately not a dashboard. One thing needs you; everything else is filed, waiting, or already handled — and it says so in a sentence before it shows you a single list.
The people you are waiting on sit under it, because that is the half of the job no task list models.
See it on your own work.
Zephyr is in development for iOS and Android. Join the early access list.