# The digest: your period, told without you writing it.

Source: https://www.onsecondbrain.com/guide/digest  
Language: en  
Spanish version: https://www.onsecondbrain.com/guide/digest.es.md

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Every so often — a day, a week, six months — the digest gathers what happened and tells it: what moved in each project, what got decided, who unblocked what and what is still open. It is not a metrics dashboard and not an activity log: it is written prose you read in five minutes, drawn from material already in your workspace, and it can reach you by email at the hour you choose without you asking for it.

## How it is put together

### What it is, and what it is not

It lives in the Pulse tab, under Digest. You pick the period, hit generate, and in under a minute the text is there.

What sets it apart from any automatic summary is where the material comes from: it does not read "your activity", it reads your content, with its Atlas labels already attached. That is why it groups by project and by client instead of by day.

> **The rule that shapes the text**
>
> A digest synthesises, it does not enumerate. Ten syncs about the same thing are one sentence, not ten bullets. The narration tells the story and the bullets carry the hard facts — decisions, deliverables, dates. And each fact appears once, in the project that represents it best.
>
> Whatever has no data is left out: if there were no meetings, there is no empty meetings section. Nothing gets padded with "TBD".

![A digest with the period metrics and the summary by project](https://www.onsecondbrain.com/screens/guide/digest.png)

_The numbers of the period on top; underneath, what happened project by project, with people and dates linked to their Atlas entries._

### The periods

There are seven fixed periods and a Custom one, with whatever date range you pick. The long ones are rolling windows — the last 90, 180 or 365 days — not the calendar quarter or half-year: a six-month digest requested on August 20 starts on February 22, not on July 1.

| Period | What it covers |
| --- | --- |
| Daily | The whole previous day. It excludes today: the email arrives in the morning and today's meetings have not happened yet. |
| Weekly | The current week, Monday through today. |
| Biweekly | This week and the one before. |
| Monthly | The last 30 days. |
| Quarterly | The last 90 days. |
| Six-month | The last 180 days. |
| Annual | The last 365 days. |
| Custom | Whatever date range you pick. |

Each period keeps its own history: weekly digests do not mix with monthly ones, and regenerating one for the same day and the same type overwrites the previous one instead of piling up copies.

### What it is built from

Everything that goes into the digest comes from the requested period, and from nowhere else:

- **The daily notes** — The text exactly as you wrote it, in chronological order. Grouped by month in a long period.
- **The recaps** — With their summary, their entities, the document they live in and the calendar event they correspond to.
- **Meetings with no recap** — The ones that happened and left no recording, with their attendees. For a digest that is information, not filler.
- **The tasks** — Closed, new, and the ones carried over or overdue. Cancelled ones never make it in.
- **The deliverables** — The grouping you already saw in the app, so progress is told per deliverable instead of task by task.
- **The documents** — The ones modified during the period, with their labels, so they are counted inside the project they belong to.

Out of that comes a text that — from a weekly upwards — takes this shape: Executive summary, Activity by project (the main section, narration plus supporting bullets), Other only if something genuinely fits nowhere, Key people when someone crossed several projects, and Next actions. The daily one is shorter: what happened, work done, tasks completed and what is urgent today.

### What changes in a six-month digest

A half-year is not a week with more data: it is a different text. A reader does not want the detail of every meeting from four months ago, they want the shape of the period. So long periods change three things.

1. **More material comes in, with less detail each** — A weekly looks at few notes and few meetings, with plenty of text from each; a six-month one looks at many more, with less text from each. The other way round does not work: at weekly detail, half a year ends up talking only about the last few weeks.
2. **Everything goes in chronologically, grouped by month** — Notes come in oldest to newest, with a header per month, so the report does not open talking about July when the period starts in February.
3. **Sections appear that a weekly does not have** — A month-by-month timeline, milestones and results, improvement opportunities and conclusions. And the maximums go up: in a long period one project can take ten bullets and the report can run several pages.

| Extra section | Where it shows up |
| --- | --- |
| Milestones of the month | Monthly. The 3 to 6 advances that defined the month, with dates. Something important that got stuck is a milestone too. |
| Timeline | Quarterly, six-month and annual. One paragraph per month, chained to the previous one, and never skipping a month that has material. |
| Milestones and results | Quarterly, six-month and annual. The big wins with their impact — and what was attempted and left halfway. |
| Improvement opportunities | Monthly and up. Patterns with the evidence from the period behind them. If the data shows none, the whole section is dropped. |
| Conclusions | Quarterly, six-month and annual. Where real progress happened, what stayed open, and what you walk into the next period with. |

## Shaping it and receiving it

### How you shape it

The shape of the digest is chosen once, in the Digest tab of the workspace settings — you also get there from the foot of the digests panel —, and applies to every digest generated afterwards.

- Narrative — tells what happened with a temporal thread, in prose. This is the default.
- Executive — headlines, decisions and risks. To be read in two minutes.
- By project — grouped by project or client, with status and next steps for each.
- New structure — up to two of your own, written with whatever headings and sections you want. They start from an editable example, not from a blank page.

Next to it there is an extra instructions field: free text that shifts the focus without changing the structure ("always talk money in dollars", "data team first", "do not name clients"). The structure rules the format; the instructions rule the emphasis.

![The Digest tab of the workspace settings](https://www.onsecondbrain.com/screens/guide/settings-workspace.png)

_The Digest tab: the structure defines the shape of the report, the extra instructions shift its focus, and scheduling sits underneath._

### The automatic email · Pro

The digest can arrive on its own, without you opening the app. You turn it on in the same tab — or from Schedule digests, at the foot of the digests panel — and configure it at two levels. It depends on the workspace owner's plan: if they leave Pro, deliveries stop even though the schedule stays saved.

![The digest delivery schedule, with the matrix of days and types](https://www.onsecondbrain.com/screens/guide/settings-digest-mail.png)

_Simple mode is one hour and one type, with the option to skip the weekend. Turn on Advanced (per day) and the matrix appears: days as columns, types as rows, one cell marked per day. Here: biweekly on Monday, daily Tuesday through Thursday, weekly on Friday and nothing on the weekend. The hour is stored in your local time: the email goes out at that hour or up to half an hour later._

The email goes to the workspace owner's address, with the full report laid out and the reading time on top:

![The weekly digest email, with the executive summary and the activity by project](https://www.onsecondbrain.com/screens/guide/mail-digest.png)

_The email exactly as it arrives, built on a real digest from the example workspace. Inside is the same text you see in the app — executive summary, activity by project, key people and next actions — with people and dates highlighted. It runs on for several more sections below the crop._

### In the app

A generated digest is not an email that gets lost: it stays on screen, with context around it.

- Charts inside the text: the period's numbers against the previous one, the fronts, what is still open, deliverables and your boards. The AI does not make them up: they are counted over the same data you see in the app, and the text comments on them. In the email they arrive as tables, and over MCP as text.
- At the end, Commitments with no progress: what is still open and also still, with no meetings or notes moving it.
- Digests sit in a side panel that collapses like the boards panel in Tasks.
- What happened since it was generated: a counter of new activity, so you know whether the report has gone stale. Looking at it uses no quota.
- Search inside the digest with ⌘F, and export it as text, Markdown or PDF.
- The people, projects and organizations it mentions stay linked to their entries in the Atlas.

### Quotas and cost

Generating a digest is one of the most expensive things in the product, so each workspace has a monthly allowance set by the plan.

- Free comes with 4; Hobby, 200; Pro, 400; Unlimited, 900. When it runs out, the notice tells you how many days until it renews.
- Long periods count for more than one: a quarterly or six-month digest counts as ten.
- Regenerating counts too: it overwrites the previous report, but uses allowance like a new one.

- [Tasks and detection](https://www.onsecondbrain.com/guide/tasks) — Where your tasks come from, the boards to look at them and deliverables.
- [Meeting recaps](https://www.onsecondbrain.com/guide/recaps) — Record audio and screen, transcribe and pull the action items.
- [Settings](https://www.onsecondbrain.com/guide/settings) — Both settings screens, tab by tab.