It’s Monday morning. You sit down with your coffee, open Slack, and there’s a report waiting: every conversation from your community last week, sorted and linked. The questions you owe an answer. The threads that stalled. The wins. The posts that took off without you.
That’s a scheduled Circle MCP weekly recap. You triage it in 10 minutes and get on with your day.
Compare that to the usual Monday. Scrolling back through seven days of posts. Trying to remember what you missed. Finding the question from two weeks ago that nobody answered, including you.
Here’s how to set up the recap once, put it on a schedule, and have it land in Slack before you’ve finished the first cup.
How Do You Schedule a Circle MCP Weekly Recap?
Connect Circle and Slack inside Claude Cowork, describe the report in a single prompt, and let Claude turn it into a scheduled task. Then run it once by hand to approve access.
Claude Cowork is a desktop app from Anthropic that lets you schedule Claude to run tasks for you. You build the workflow once and set the cadence. After that, the work happens whether you’re at your desk or at the beach.
It works with your Circle MCP, so it’s reading your real community data, not a summary you pasted in. Same prompts you’ve been running by hand, now running on their own, with the output delivered where your team already lives. For me that’s Slack. It can be wherever yours is.
If you watched the first video in my Circle MCP 101 series, you’ve seen the weekly recap prompt I run in my own community. This is the next step: the same prompt, on autopilot.
Think of it as a new teammate you don’t have to pay, feed, or send a holiday gift to.
What Do You Need Before You Set It Up?
Three things: a Claude Cowork account, which comes with Claude Pro and Max, your Circle MCP already connected, and a Slack workspace with a channel ready for the reports.
Your Circle connection
The Circle side is a custom MCP connector, and it’s its own setup. Without it, nothing in this post works.
What that looks like:
- Connect your Circle MCP before you open Cowork
- If you haven’t done it yet, stop here and do that first
- Come back once Claude can see your community
This is the step people skip because they want the fun part. It’s also the one that makes the fun part possible.
Your Slack connection
The Slack side is much simpler.
What that looks like:
- Open the connectors area in Cowork and find Slack
- Click Connect and choose your workspace
- Authorize it, and you’re done
A channel just for the reports
Give the reports their own home. A dedicated channel keeps them from getting buried in your team’s regular chatter.
What that looks like:
- Create a Slack channel only for these reports
- Name it something obvious (mine is coCreator Updates)
- Point every scheduled report there, so you have one clean place to check each week
What Goes in the Weekly Recap Prompt?
Four things: what you want, when you want it, how it’s structured, and where it should land. That’s the whole prompt. Claude handles the scheduling from there.
Open the Claude app, go to Cowork, and start a new conversation. Mine tells Claude:
- What: a weekly catch-up report on my Circle community
- When: every Monday at 7:00 AM my local time, looking back at the last seven days
- How it’s structured: four categories, with every item getting a one-sentence summary, the space it lives in, and a direct link to the post
- Where: a specific channel in my Slack workspace
The four categories are what make this worth reading instead of skimming:
- Needs my attention: the questions you actually need to answer
- Hanging: the threads that stalled out and could use a nudge
- Celebrations: the wins worth calling out
- Resonating: the conversations doing their thing without you
Claude reads the prompt, checks your connectors, asks any clarifying questions, and creates the scheduled task. It takes about two minutes. Probably faster than your barista.
Why Do You Have to Run It Once by Hand?
Scheduled tasks can’t ask for permission while you’re away. If you don’t approve Circle and Slack access up front, the first scheduled run pauses and your report never arrives.
Open the scheduled section in the Cowork sidebar, find the task Claude just created, and click Run now.
The first time it runs, Cowork asks for permission to access both Circle and Slack. Click Allow for each. Then give it a minute or so, and the report should land in your channel.
That first run takes a little longer than the rest. Don’t fret if it looks like it’s cycling. It’s doing the setup work you only do once.
One approval now means every run after it goes through without you. Future you will thank present you.
How Do You Change the Recap Later?
Go back to the same Cowork conversation and tell Claude what you want different. The schedule, format, categories, channel, and look of the report are all adjustable, and none of it takes code.
You talk to it the way you’d talk to a teammate. A very fast one who never needs a coffee break.
Things worth tweaking once you’ve seen a few reports:
- The day or time it runs
- The categories, if yours don’t map to how your community works
- The format, emojis, and overall look
- The channel it lands in
If you run a busy community, a week of activity may be too much to take in at once. Set it to run every morning instead. It’s a small change to the prompt, same format, just on a daily cadence. For active communities, that’s what I’d suggest.
This recap is for you and your team. If you want the member-facing version, the email that goes out to everyone, that’s the Circle AI weekly digest setup.
Does Your Computer Need to Be On for It to Run?
Yes. Cowork runs on the computer where the app is installed, so the device has to be on and the app open for a scheduled task to fire. It isn’t running in the cloud.
If your computer is asleep at 7:00 AM on Monday, the report won’t run until the next time you open Cowork.
This is the part that surprises people, and it’s worth knowing before you build a Monday ritual around it. Pick a setup that works for you: a machine that stays on, a schedule that matches when you’re actually at your desk, or both.
The magic is real. It just needs to be awake.
Try This Prompt
Paste this into a new Cowork conversation and fill in the blanks.
“Set up a scheduled task that creates a weekly catch-up report on my Circle community. Run it every [day] at [time] my local time, looking back at the last seven days. Sort everything into four categories: needs my attention, hanging, celebrations, and resonating. For each item, give me a one-sentence summary, the space it lives in, and a direct link to the post. Deliver the report to the [channel name] channel in my Slack workspace.”
Claude will check your connectors and ask anything it needs before it creates the task. You still decide what counts as needing your attention.
Stop Starting the Week by Searching
The report doesn’t answer anyone for you. It can’t reply to the question someone posted on Tuesday, and it shouldn’t. If you’re weighing what to hand over and what to keep, I drew that line in what you should never let AI do in your community.
What it takes off your plate is the hunting. Scrolling, remembering, piecing a week back together from memory. That was never the part your members needed from you.
Hand off the finding and keep the replying. That’s the trade that gives you more room to be human in your community, not less.
Monday gets to be coffee and ten minutes of the right replies. That’s the whole ritual.
Watch the Video
New videos go up every Thursday on Your Community Strategist.
Watch This One
More like it on Your Community Strategist, new every Thursday.
More Like This
Watch: Automate Your Circle Invite Follow Ups With Claude Cowork. Another recurring Circle job handed to Cowork, built the same way.
Watch: Circle MCP Tutorial: The New Member Welcome Prompt I Run Every Week. The next prompt in the series, and a strong candidate for its own schedule.
Listen: What You Should Never Let AI Do in Your Community. The line between what to automate and what to keep for yourself.
Listen: How AI Can Make You More Human in Your Community (Not Less). What the time you get back is actually for.
Keep Going
coCreator Society is where community builders and membership founders work through this together, with the templates, the walkthroughs, and people who are one step ahead of you. Join coCreator Society
If you would rather not do this part alone, Rachel and the team build, migrate, and run communities for founders who need it done properly the first time. Talk to the team
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