Borrowed Recipe
Eight schedules that pre-sort your reading pile
One giant feed, gone, and your reading shows up pre-sorted before breakfast.
Give each kind of source its own Gemini schedule and its own question, so papers, release notes and forum chatter stop elbowing each other in one list.
Thanks to Kentaro Mori for laying out the whole spread, routine by routine.
🧾 What’s cooking
- Why: by their account, papers, release notes and engineering posts answer different questions, and one combined list made it hard to decide what to read closely.
- The dish: scheduled actions in Gemini. You write a prompt that says when and how often, and Gemini prepares the answer in the background so it’s ready at delivery time (Gemini Apps Help: schedules in Gemini Apps).
- Their eight routines, as set up when they wrote the post (they note this is the configured schedule, not a log of every run):
- ten papers or technical reports each morning, with a closer look at one
- Hacker News and three subreddits, for what developers are debating, with links to the threads
- ten practical articles about what went wrong for people and how they fixed it
- cloud release notes, read for changes that could stop an existing setup from working
- one story followed over time, with an alert when something changes
- short news summaries, morning and evening
- a daily pick of technical videos
- technical books, on the first of each month
- Secret ingredient: the schedule and the question are separate choices. For papers they ask what’s new and how it might help their development work; for cloud updates, whether the change could affect their systems.
🍳 Difficulty · ⏱️ Prep time
| No-code | |
|---|---|
| Difficulty | 🟢 Beginner |
| Prep | About 10 minutes per routine |
🛒 Ingredients
- A personal Google Account, or a work or school account on a qualifying Google Workspace edition. Google is rolling schedules out to personal accounts gradually, so yours may not have them yet (Gemini Apps Help: schedules in Gemini Apps).
- Keep Activity turned on, since schedules don’t work without it (Gemini Apps Help: schedules in Gemini Apps). It’s on by default if you’re 18 or over; check under Settings & help → Activity (Gemini Apps Help: manage your activity).
- Room on the shelf: up to 10 active schedules at a time, so all eight fit (Gemini Apps Help: schedules in Gemini Apps).
👩🍳 Method: no code
- Start with one topic, as they suggest: where to look, how often, and what decision the summary should help you make.
- Go to gemini.google.com and type the prompt, including when and how often it should run. Gemini replies with a summary of the schedule (Gemini Apps Help: schedules in Gemini Apps).
- Give every routine its own question. The paper prompt below is adapted from the example they wrote for readers; it asks for links and for what Gemini couldn’t read in full.
- Add the others one at a time. They all live on the Scheduled page in the sidebar, where you can edit, pause or delete them (Gemini Apps Help: schedules in Gemini Apps).
- When a run is ready, the Gemini mobile app sends a notification. On the web, the schedule’s chat shows up as unread (Gemini Apps Help: schedules in Gemini Apps).
Every morning at <time>: my interests are <topic 1>, <topic 2> and <topic 3>.
Pick ten recent papers, preprints or technical reports from research labs and company research teams.
For each one, say what's new and how the method or system works.
Then pick the most relevant one and go deeper: possible uses, and what I should check before trying it.
Link every source. Separate what you checked from what you guessed, and say if you couldn't read the full text.
😋 Taste test
- Read the first few runs, then tighten the question.
- Their habit after reading: open the original source, check how a method was tested and which versions it supports, and only then decide what to read or try next. The summary is the menu, not the meal.
- Not every routine needs to run daily: they run news twice a day but books just once a month.
🔥 Watch the stove
- Answers are prepared ahead of time, so fast-moving numbers like stock prices won’t be the latest. Google says schedules work best for daily summaries and wrap-ups (Gemini Apps Help: schedules in Gemini Apps).
- A schedule can switch itself off after a stretch of inactivity. Resume it from the Scheduled page (Gemini Apps Help: schedules in Gemini Apps).
- Want Gmail, Calendar or another app in a routine? That app has to be connected first (Gemini Apps Help: schedules in Gemini Apps).
- Their own warnings: even a detailed prompt can get things wrong, and project details may not be OK to share, so check before you paste them in.