You know that feeling when you open your inbox in the morning and it’s just… chaos?
Meeting invites. Follow-ups. “Quick questions.” And before you even start working, half your day is already gone.
Now, imagine if you had an executive assistant sitting beside you, not a human one, but an AI one, that reviewed your schedule, prioritized what mattered, and even drafted responses to help you get ahead before your first cup of coffee.
I’m talking about Microsoft Copilot, and specifically a hidden gem inside it: Scheduled Prompts.
If you’ve never heard of them, these prompts can make Copilot act like your personal assistant inside Outlook and Teams. And today, I’ll show you exactly how to set them up and how I use them to manage my inbox, prioritize my day, and prep for my week.
Most people open Outlook and react. They let their day happen to them. Chasing emails, juggling meetings, and firefighting instead of leading.
Scheduled Prompts flip that dynamic.
They let Copilot proactively brief you, automatically generating summaries, action lists, and drafts based on your schedule and messages.
I’ve been testing them for the past month they’ve changed the way I start my day. You can leverage them to run any prompt on a scheduled cadence and send you the results.
To get started, open the Copilot app in Microsoft Teams or head to Office.com (which redirects you into the new Copilot chat experience). From there:
Create a new prompt.
Write what you want Copilot to do, such as:
“ “Summarize my unread emails from the past week, focusing on ones I haven’t replied to. Rank them by importance (1–5) and draft replies for anything rated above 3.”
After you submit the prompt. Hover over your prompt and select “Schedule this prompt.”
Choose the time and frequency — for example, every weekday at 8:30 AM.
(Optional) Check the box to get notified by email when your prompt runs.
And that’s it, your AI assistant now has a morning routine.
You can view or manage all your scheduled prompts in the Copilot panel under the Scheduled Prompts tab. You can run them on demand, pause them, or delete them at any time.
Here’s one of the prompts I use daily:
“ “Summarize emails from the past day that haven’t received a reply. Rank importance 1–5. Draft an initial response for anything above 3.”
When I run it, Copilot quickly scans my inbox, identifies pending conversations, ranks them by priority, and gives me a short draft reply for each one.
Are the drafts perfect? Not always. But even when they’re 80% right, that’s still 80% less typing — and a lot more focus time.
The real benefit here is batching my work. Instead of reacting to every ping, I review these summaries twice a day and handle email in focused blocks.
Every Friday at 9 AM, I have another scheduled prompt that helps me prep for next week.
It’s simple but powerful:
“ “Review next week’s meetings, summarize key topics, and highlight any conflicts or action items still pending from this week.”.
Copilot delivers a short summary listing my meetings, attached files, and any related notes or threads it finds across Outlook, Teams, and OneDrive.
It’s like having a personal Chief of Staff who taps me on the shoulder and says, “Hey, let’s not walk into Monday blind again.”
Scheduled prompts aren’t just for personal productivity, they can help your business too.
“ “Search trusted web sources and social media websites to find any mention of CloudCapsule, cloudcapsule.io, tminus365. Summarize the list of mentions. Do not include information directly from the sources of cloudcapsule.io or tminus365.com. Search across reddit and discord”
I use one to monitor mentions of CloudCapsule across the web.
It’s set to search sources like Reddit and Discord for recent discussions or feedback about our app.
It’s not perfect, sometimes it surfaces outdated posts but running this weekly gives me a quick pulse check on how the product is being discussed online.
Behind the scenes, scheduled prompts are powered by the Workflows app in Teams, built on the Power Platform.
Microsoft has even added a growing catalog of pre-built workflows like:
Help me prepare for my day
Help me prepare for my week
These can automatically summarize your meetings, surface important emails, and send daily or weekly recaps straight to Teams or your inbox.
For example, my “Prepare for Next Week” workflow runs every Friday, generating a summary of upcoming meetings, important messages, and recent documents all delivered as a chat from Copilot.
If you want Copilot to actually work for you, stop treating it like a toy and start treating it like an assistant.
Here’s my challenge to you this week:
👉 Create two scheduled prompts — one daily and one weekly — and see how it changes your workflow
And remember:
😆 Clippy walked so Copilot could run your calendar.