Free template · Internal Ops

What you missed in Slack while you were busy.

Summarizes a busy channel daily. Decisions made, open questions, action items. Sends to people who muted but still need to know. Async work without needing to scroll back through.

Setup time ~20 minutes
Run cost ~$0.10/mo
Validation Tested + ready to run
License Free, yours forever

What it does

Channel to inbox.

  1. 1
    Daily 5pm Schedule (weekdays)
    Cron: 0 17 * * 1-5. Fires Monday through Friday at the end of the workday.
  2. 2
    Fetch Channel Messages — Slack API
    Pulls up to 200 messages from the configured channel since 24 hours ago using conversations.history. Bot must be a member of the channel; needs channels:history scope.
  3. 3
    Format Transcript — Code
    Strips Slack metadata down to speaker + text, reverses chronologically (oldest first), joins into a single transcript string.
  4. 4
    Summarize — OpenAI
    Asks gpt-4o-mini for three bulleted sections: decisions made, open questions, action items with owners (when mentioned). Plain text, 200-word cap. Skips jokes and chit-chat.
  5. 5
    Email Summary
    Sends the summary to the owner. Swap for a Slack DM if you'd rather see it there.

Use it in your business

Vertical-specific framing

Agency owner
Summarizes #client-acme so you walk into the partner sync already knowing the open questions. Run one per major client channel.
Consulting partner
Summarizes #internal-strategy so you don't need to scroll through 200 messages on Monday morning to catch up from your Friday off.
Engineering or product manager
Summarizes #engineering or #product-decisions so the weekly memo writes itself.
Operations leader
Summarizes #ops or #escalations so you spot patterns across the week without keeping every channel open.
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What you'll need

Three accounts. All free or close to.

n8n Free self-hosted, or n8n Cloud starting $20/mo
Slack workspace + bot token xoxb token with channels:history scope
OpenAI API key Pay-as-you-go, ~$0.005 per summary (200 messages)
Gmail or Outlook For the email delivery

The math

What this is worth, conservatively

Time spent reading Slack backlog daily 20-40 minutes/channel
Time with this workflow ~2 minutes reading the digest
Annualized for 1 channel, 250 weekdays ~75-150 hours recovered
Plus: missed decisions caught (e.g., teammate flagged a blocker you didn't see) harder to quantify, real
Cost to run this template forever ~$1.20/year

Time savings based on Atlassian state-of-work and Slack's own usage research. Per-channel impact depends on volume and signal-to-noise ratio.

Other templates you might want

Related

Internal Ops
Daily Ops Digest 7am
Morning version. Pulls from CRM, PM, calendar, payments instead of Slack.
Internal Ops · Email
Inbox Triage Agent
Same philosophy applied to email. classify and route every message.
Internal Ops · Documents
SOP Generator from Recording
Turn recurring 'how do I do X?' Slack threads into a written SOP from a Loom recording.

Want this tuned to your channels?

If you'd rather have us run summaries across multiple channels, route different summaries to different people, or merge with your CRM and PM tool. that's our $3,500-6,000 ops layer build. 1 to 2 weeks.

Book a 15-min walkthrough