A daily brief you stop reading halfway through is not doing its job. Two things usually cause that. It arrives carrying types of item you do not act on, or it arrives at a time when you have no room for it.
Both are settings. What the brief includes, and where it arrives, is under Settings → Notifications, in the Daily brief group. When it arrives is under Settings → Briefing & Actions, in the Daily briefing group. Briefing and action settings is the tour of that second screen.
Choose which types appear
The Daily brief group on Settings → Notifications has a table with one row per type of item Brief puts in the brief:
- Commitments
- Today's schedule
- Open questions
- Suggested tasks
- Agent reports
- What you got done
Each row has two checkboxes, In the app and In the email. The first governs the brief on your Today page, the second governs the daily email. Clear both to keep a type out of the brief in the app and in the email. Clear only In the email to keep the morning email short while the full brief stays in the app, or only In the app for the reverse. What you got done appears only in the email, so its row has one checkbox. If you have turned on the Goals preview, a Goals row appears too, also email only. The table does not change a WhatsApp brief, which is a count of your meetings, priority emails and decisions with a link to the full brief.
Taking a type out of the brief does not remove it from Brief. Commitments are still on the Commitments page, suggested tasks are still on Tasks, and the day's meetings are still on Meetings. You have moved them out of the morning read, not out of Brief.
If the brief runs long for you, this is the shortest fix. Clear the type you never act on and keep reading the rest.
Choose where it arrives
Above the table, the same group has one switch for each channel the brief can go to: Email, Slack, WhatsApp, iPhone and Browser. Email, iPhone and Browser start on. Email and Browser always show. Slack, WhatsApp and iPhone show once Brief can reach you there. Browser works once you allow notifications in that browser, under This browser on the same page. Turn off Email to stop the daily email.
Set the time, the timezone, and the days
The Daily briefing group on Settings → Briefing & Actions controls when the brief goes out.
Timezone is used both for scheduling your briefings and for displaying times everywhere else in Brief, so it is worth getting right before anything else.
Briefing time sets when the brief is generated and sent, in half-hour increments across the day. The default is 6:00 AM local time.
Briefing days is a row of day chips, and it is the setting most people want without knowing it exists. If you read the brief on weekdays and skim it on weekends, turn Saturday and Sunday off. The days apply to the scheduled brief on every channel: on other days, Brief sends no scheduled brief by email, Slack, WhatsApp or notification. A brief that you ask for still arrives on any day, in the WhatsApp thread or with /dailybrief in Slack. The brief is still on the Today page on a Sunday morning if you open Brief. At least one day has to stay selected. To stop the email entirely, turn off Email on Settings → Notifications rather than clearing every day.
One more toggle sits in the same group. Calendar briefings adds meeting briefings to your Brief AI calendar, which is what puts a briefing next to each invite. They arrive on every day, whatever your briefing days.
If you have linked WhatsApp, Brief does not send the brief there until you turn on WhatsApp in the Daily brief group on Settings → Notifications. Once it is on, Briefing time, Timezone and Briefing days govern the scheduled WhatsApp brief as they govern the email. Drop the weekend from Briefing days and the scheduled WhatsApp brief stops on the weekend too. Turn the switch off to stop it. You can still chat with Brief in WhatsApp. See Connecting WhatsApp to Brief.
Dismissing an item
Every item in the brief can be dismissed, and dismissing works on that item. It does not create a standing rule about the subject.
This is worth being plain about, because the behavior surprises people. You dismiss an item about a thread. A new email lands on that thread a week later, Brief reads it, and a new item appears. Nothing went wrong and your dismissal was not ignored. The dismissal applied to the item, and this is a different item built from newer information.
There is no setting today that mutes a subject across future briefs. If a recurring subject is generating items you never want, the levers that exist are the type filters above, and which accounts you connect.
When work and personal email share an inbox
This is the most common source of noise in a brief, and it is worth naming as the cause rather than treating each item as a mistake. If one inbox carries both your work and your life, Brief reads both, and it has no way to know which half you meant. Family travel plans arrive next to a contract renewal because they arrived next to each other.
Two things help. Connect the accounts you want read rather than every account you own, under Settings → Connections. Brief supports several accounts at once, including several from the same provider, so a work Google account and a personal one can both be connected, or only one of them. See Supported sources and what Brief syncs.
Then use the type filters to cut whichever category the personal traffic tends to land in.
Topics
The Topics page groups related work into subjects Brief has recognized across your sources. A topic there can be hidden or dismissed, which takes it out of your topic list. Use it for a topic Brief has assembled that is not really a thing you work on.
Hiding a topic is a correction to your topic list. Treat it as tidying that list rather than as a way to change what tomorrow's email contains.
If the brief is still not right
Tell us. The extraction behind the brief is tuned against real reader feedback, and "this section is redundant" or "this item should never have been here" is more useful to the team than a filter you set silently. See Contacting support.