Who in the team is out this week, whether you are, where your meeting time went, your briefing, your unanswered emails and a clear-out of your inbox — in one file. Everything runs on this laptop via the built-in mshta.exe: it reads your own Outlook and nothing is ever sent anywhere.
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Daily Briefing
What needs me today?
The meetings you have to be at next, and the emails addressed to you that are still waiting on a reply.
▶ Settings
or an exact date range — from to
or an exact date range — from to
(untick to also show ones you already answered)
Include an email when I am:
and it came from:
Whatever you change here is remembered — the briefing opens with it next time.
You never have to open the Brain — it is the private memory of which senders and topics matter to you, written for you by the +/−, “no reply needed” and “treat as” buttons. Open it only to hand-edit or clear those rules.
Briefing Brain — the tunable rules the briefing uses
Edit the JSON below and click Save. It is read every time you Build. Adjust keyword weights, signal weights, the reply threshold, how many emails to show, meeting-match strictness and transcript patterns. The "+ important / - not" buttons on emails also write here.
This week
Checking your calendar…
Meeting load
How much of your working week did meetings take?
Reads your own Outlook calendar and works out what your meetings cost you, who they came from, and which ones come back every week. Nothing leaves this laptop.
▶ Settings
or an exact date range — from to
— everything is measured against this
What counts as a meeting. By default, the ones you genuinely attended: accepted, plus the ones you organised. Cancelled meetings and ones you declined are always left out — Outlook has no true “attended” flag, so your RSVP is the closest honest proxy.
Whatever you change here is remembered — Boring Desk opens with it next time.
Daily Briefing
What needs me today. The meetings you have to attend next, and the emails addressed to you that you have not replied to, grouped by conversation and aged.
Follow-Up Chaser
What you asked for and never got. Every conversation where you wrote last and nobody replied, longest wait first, with a one-click nudge draft.
Tidy Up
Clear out a whole class of email. Scan a folder by subject, sender or mailing-list, see the list first with its size, then move or delete the lot.
▶
Run it for me on a schedule
— click to set up (optional)
Let Windows run a tool for you automatically and drop a dated report into Documents\BoringTools (tick “draft to me” below to also get an Outlook email). Works when you are away: it runs with the screen locked, wakes the laptop from sleep, runs on battery, and catches up if the laptop was off. Because it drives your desktop Outlook, the one thing it cannot do is run while you are fully signed out or the laptop is shut down — leave it on and locked. Registers a task for your own account — no admin needed. Keep this file somewhere permanent (e.g. Documents), not a temporary Downloads folder.
Daily Briefing
Each run, show me the next day(s) of meetings
Meeting Load
Each run, look back day(s)
Follow-Up Chaser — emails you sent that nobody has answered
Scans your Sent Items, groups them by conversation, and lists every thread where you were the last to write and no reply has come back — sorted by how long you have been waiting. One click opens a pre-written nudge. Runs 100% on this laptop; nothing is sent anywhere until you press Send yourself.
Tidy up
Find a whole class of email, look at it, then move or delete the lot.
Set the rule, press Show me what matches, and every affected email is listed before anything happens. Nothing changes until you press Apply and confirm. Deleted mail goes to Deleted Items, so it is recoverable.
or an exact date range — from to
Then do what with them?
Team setup
Where the team leave file lives.
This tab is setup only — point it at the Biz Lead workbook on the shared drive once and it remembers. The answer itself shows on Home, under your own out of office. The file is opened read-only and never changed.
▶ Settings
1. The file — on the shared drive, or a synced OneDrive / SharePoint folder.
Paste the path on this PC, not the web address. In File Explorer, hold Shift, right-click the file → Copy as path — it should start C:\Users\. A SharePoint library you added to OneDrive as a shortcut appears there as an ordinary folder.
If it will not open: the contents are probably still in the cloud. Right-click the folder inside your OneDrive shortcut → Always keep on this device, wait for the green tick, then press Test this file.
2. The two worksheets
optional — leave blank to skip
3. Where things are on each sheet— every box here is optional: leave one empty and it works that out for itself. The numbers and letters are the ones Excel shows down the side and across the top.
Worked out for you when the sheets are read.
Leave sheet — a date per row, a person per column
dates are in column
· rows to
names are in row
· columns to
Office schedule — a person per row, the weekdays across
names are in column
· rows to
weekdays are in row
· columns to
Set rows to the first and last person and the Total for Group / Total Seats / % lines underneath stop being counted as colleagues.
All of this is remembered on this PC.
What counts as being in the office: on the second sheet, a 1 in the cell where the person’s row meets the weekday column. That sheet is a standing weekly pattern, not dates — so anyone the leave sheet says is off that day is taken back out again.
What counts as leave: a cell under someone’s name, on a date row, whose value starts with 1 or 0.5 — so 1, 0.5, 1 - extra, 0.5 DR test and 1 day - Go-live all count, and anything after the number is kept as the reason. WFH, WIO, WK and Training - 0.5 AM do not — they do not start with the number.