The Agency comes with a set of ready-made tasks. Daily briefings, news roundups, PR summaries. They're useful out of the box. But they're generic by design. They don't know that you use Obsidian for notes, or that your GTD system lives in a specific folder structure, or that you track wine bottles in a personal vault.

A task that writes your journal

Here's one I built for myself: an automated evening journal. Every night at 23:00, my agent looks at everything I did during the day and writes a narrative journal entry. In first person, like I wrote it myself.

Here's what I told my agent:

Sample prompt

Help me create a new task that runs every evening at 23:00. I would like an automated journal entry created every evening with all the things that I have been doing during the day, like a review for posterity. It should read like I wrote it in first-person, like a narrative, not just listing things. In Obsidian, check: - Daily note - Events (for meetings and meeting notes) - GTD system — done and in-progress actions (use title for these, since file names are just timestamps) - GTD system — completed and created projects, higher level items - Check all updated notes to see if there is anything else relevant. For instance if I have consumed or added a wine bottle, read some article, etc. Also cross-reference with Calendar. Personal, Family, and Work calendars. Also cross-reference any reports and chat history from the day. Also cross-reference GitHub activity — commits, closed PRs, closed issues, new comments. Run silent so it doesn't create its own report.

That's one message. My agent turned it into a scheduled task that runs every night, pulling from half a dozen sources, and writing a coherent journal entry that reads like I sat down and reflected on my day.

That last line, "run silent," is a nice trick. Normally, every task run saves its output as a report and as a journal entry. But since this task already creates a journal entry, I don't need a duplicate report cluttering my reports feed. Running silent tells the task to skip the extra report and just save the journal.

You could even take this further and have the agent write the journal entry back into your Obsidian daily note, closing the loop entirely. We use Connect MCP for connecting to Obsidian, and it works with any MCP-compatible tool.

Why custom tasks matter

Pre-built tasks are great for getting started, but your workflow is unique. The tools you use, the way you organize things, the information you care about — no template can capture that.

Custom tasks let you describe exactly what you want in your own words. You don't need to map your workflow to someone else's template. You describe it, and your agent figures out how to execute it.

Some examples of what people are building:

Weekly meal planning. "Check what's in my Notion grocery list, cross-reference with this week's calendar for busy nights, and suggest a meal plan."
Project status reports. "Every Monday, check GitHub for all activity in my repos, summarize open PRs and issues, and draft a status update."
Health tracking. "Every evening, check my notes for any health entries (symptoms, medications, exercise) and add them to my health log."
Content curation. "Every morning, check my bookmarks and reading list for new additions, summarize each article in two sentences."

Tips for writing good task prompts

The more specific you are, the better your agent performs. Here's what helps:

Name your tools and locations. Don't say "check my notes" — say "check my Obsidian vault" or "check the daily note in my notes app." If there's a specific URL, folder, or calendar name, include it.

Describe the output you want. "A summary" is vague. "A first-person narrative journal entry" is specific. "A bullet list of action items grouped by project" is even more specific.

Mention your sources explicitly. If you want your agent to cross-reference multiple things — calendar, notes, GitHub, chat history — list them all. Your agent won't guess which sources matter to you.

Set the schedule. Tell your agent when to run it: "every evening at 23:00", "every Monday at 9:00", "every Friday at 17:00". You can always adjust later.

Getting started

Go to your chat and describe the routine you want. Start with something simple — a daily summary, a weekly review, a recurring check-in. Your agent will help you refine the instructions and set up the schedule.

The tasks that work best are the ones that match how you actually work, not how a template thinks you should.