I would scroll back through 200 messages every morning. Now I get the 5 that matter.
The workflow
- Pull yesterday messages via n8n
- Send them to Claude for a summary
- Highlight decisions and blockers
- Post to a summary channel
Result: The overnight recap without the scrollback.
The prompt
Summarise these Slack messages into: decisions made, open questions, and blockers. Messages:
[PASTE]A note on what follows. The workflow, the prompt and the result above come from the member. The notes below (why the prompt works, what to watch for, how to adapt it) were written with AI help.
Why this prompt works
Three buckets, and the useful one is blockers. Decisions and open questions I could mostly infer by skimming. Blockers are what I was missing at 9am, because they hide inside long threads where two people are being polite about a dependency that has not moved for a week. Naming the bucket forces the model to go looking for them. I keep the categories in that order deliberately. When I had blockers first it started labelling ordinary disagreement as a blocker and I stopped trusting the list. One more thing that took me a while: I paste the raw export with usernames and timestamps intact. Stripping those felt tidier and made the summary noticeably worse, because it could no longer tell who was answering whom.
What to watch for
- Jokes read as decisions. Our channel is sarcastic and it does not always land.
- A thread that ends without resolution gets summarised as if it resolved. This is the one that has burned me most.
- Threads inside threads get flattened, so two separate conversations merge into one made-up consensus.
- Emoji reactions carry a lot of meaning in our team and they are invisible to it. A message with eight thumbs up looks the same as one nobody read.
How to adapt it
- For a channel where you only care about your own area, add
Ignore anything that does not involve the ops team. - To catch things aimed at you, add
List anything that names me or asks a question I have not answered. - If you run this on a busy channel, add
Quote the message that supports each decision.so you can jump straight to the source.
What good output looks like
Short. If the summary is longer than a quick scroll would have been, the prompt has failed and I usually pasted too much. Every decision should have a name attached. The open questions section should be the longest of the three most mornings, because that is what a working channel actually looks like. If it comes back empty, something got smoothed over and I go read the thread.