A good system has a process anyone can follow. This module writes the SOP — the step-by-step playbook for running your morning intelligence cycle reliably every single day.
You now have eight prompts, four documents, and a briefing template. That's a powerful system — but only if you know exactly how to run it each morning. Without a written process, you'll improvise every day. Some mornings you'll run the full workflow perfectly. Others you'll skip the narrative detection or forget to run the competitor scan. Over time, inconsistency degrades the quality of your briefs.
The SOP fixes that. It's a written process — clear, sequenced, and complete — that you can follow in the same order every single morning. It also means someone else could run it for you. A colleague covering while you're on vacation, a junior team member who wants to help — the SOP is what makes that possible.
A good SOP is also a form of quality control. When something in your brief looks off, the SOP tells you exactly where in the process to look for the problem.
news-scanner/ folderTell Claude Code to write the SOP by reading all the prompts and documents you've built. It will produce a step-by-step guide that references your actual files and prompts by name.
Read all the files in my news-scanner folder — my intelligence requirements, my keyword list, my sources list, my competitor list, my triage framework, my briefing template, my narrative log, and my prompts. Create a morning scan SOP file. Write a clear, step-by-step standard operating procedure for running my daily morning intelligence cycle. Important: every scan and search step is done by Claude Code itself using web search and source fetching — there is no manual news-gathering step. The SOP should cover: Step 1: Open Claude Code and paste my Opening Move so it gets oriented on my system. Step 2: Tell Claude Code to run my Daily Scan Prompt — Claude searches the web and fetches Tier 1 and Tier 2 sources, filtered through my keyword tiers. Step 3: Tell Claude Code to run my Competitor Scan Prompt — Claude searches for any coverage of my tracked competitors, peers, and key voices. Step 4: Tell Claude Code to run my Narrative Detection Prompt — Claude looks across today's findings and prior entries in my narrative log for emerging patterns; new entries get added to the log with today's date. Step 5: Tell Claude Code to run my Triage Classification Prompt — Claude applies my four-tier framework to all of today's findings. Step 6: Tell Claude Code to run my Briefing Generation Prompt — Claude assembles everything into a finished brief in my briefing template format and saves it to my briefs folder with today's date. Step 7: Read the brief and act — review what came back, take any Tier 1 actions, and add other actions to my task list. Format this as a numbered checklist I can follow without thinking. Include notes on roughly how long each step should take and what good output looks like at each stage.
Some mornings — a major deadline, an early meeting, a travel day — you don't have 15 minutes for the full cycle. Add a compressed version to the SOP that gets you the essentials in under 5 minutes.
Add a section at the end of my morning scan SOP called "Quick Run — Under 5 Minutes." Write a compressed version of the workflow for days when time is short. The quick run should cover only: 1. Tell Claude Code to run my Quick Scan Prompt — it does the gathering itself, focused only on Tier 1 keywords and Tier 1 sources, top 3 findings 2. Scan the output for any Tier 1 items requiring immediate action 3. If there are Tier 1 items, tell Claude Code to run the triage prompt on those items only 4. Done — no narrative detection, no full brief generation on quick run days Add a note that the quick run is for emergencies only — the full SOP is what keeps the system working properly over time.
For the truly integrated morning run, add a master prompt to your prompts file. Once it's saved there, you'll never need to paste anything to run it — every morning, after your Opening Move, you just tell Claude Code "run my full news scanner" and it executes the whole cycle in sequence.
Add a final entry to my prompts file called "Full Morning Cycle — Master Prompt." This is the prompt I'll invoke each morning by simply telling you "run my full news scanner" — you'll find this entry in my prompts file and run it end to end. The master prompt should instruct you to: 1. Read my intelligence requirements, my keyword list, my sources list, my competitor list, my triage framework, and my briefing template 2. Use web search and source fetching to gather the day's news — no paste-in step needed 3. Run through the full workflow in sequence: scan → competitor check → narrative detection → triage → brief generation 4. Produce the complete brief in my briefing template format as the final output 5. Save the brief to my briefs folder with today's date in the filename Add a note at the top of the entry explaining that this is the advanced, all-in-one version — it requires all my context files to be current and accurate to work well.
Open your morning scan process guide and read through the entire thing as if you were following it for the first time with no prior knowledge of the system. Is every step clear? Is anything missing? Is the order logical? If anything would confuse you at 7:30am before coffee, fix it now.
📎 The SOP is a living document. As you run the system over the first few weeks, you'll notice small things you'd do differently. Keep a running list of adjustments, then update the SOP every couple of weeks. After a month, you'll have a process that's precisely calibrated to how you actually work.