A daily brief you stop reading halfway through is not doing its job. Two things usually cause that. It arrives carrying types of item you do not act on, or it arrives at a time when you have no room for it.
Both are settings. They live under Settings → Briefing & Actions.
Choose which types appear
The Daily brief filters group has one switch per type of item Brief puts in the brief:
- Commitments
- Open questions
- Task suggestions
Turning a type off keeps it out of the daily brief. As the setting says, it "still appears on its own list page", so nothing is lost. Commitments you turned off are still on the Commitments page, and task suggestions are still on Tasks. You have moved them out of the morning read, not out of Brief.
If the brief runs long for you, this is the shortest fix. Turn off the type you never act on and keep reading the rest.
Set the time, the timezone, and the days
The Daily briefing group controls delivery.
Timezone is used both for scheduling your briefings and for displaying times everywhere else in Brief, so it is worth getting right before anything else.
Daily briefing email turns the email on and off. Briefing time sets when the brief is generated and sent, in half-hour increments across the day. The default is 6:00 AM local time.
Email days is a row of day chips, and it is the setting most people want without knowing it exists. If you read the brief on weekdays and skim it on weekends, turn Saturday and Sunday off. The setting is scoped to the email: as the hint says, "In-app and push briefings are unaffected", so the brief is still there in the web app on a Sunday morning if you want it. At least one day has to stay selected. To stop the email entirely, use the toggle above rather than clearing every day.
Two more toggles sit in the same group. Calendar briefings adds meeting briefings to your Brief AI calendar, which is what puts a briefing next to each invite. Contact notes writes person briefing summaries back into your contact notes.
If you have linked WhatsApp, Briefing time and Timezone still govern when the WhatsApp briefing arrives, because it goes out when the brief is generated. The email-only controls do not: WhatsApp briefings are delivered over that connection rather than by email, so turning the email off or dropping the weekend from Email days leaves them arriving. Disconnect WhatsApp under Settings → Connections to stop them. See Connecting Brief to WhatsApp.
Dismissing an item
Every item in the brief can be dismissed, and dismissing works on that item. It does not create a standing rule about the subject.
This is worth being plain about, because the behavior surprises people. You dismiss an item about a thread. A new email lands on that thread a week later, Brief reads it, and a new item appears. Nothing went wrong and your dismissal was not ignored. The dismissal applied to the item, and this is a different item built from newer information.
There is no setting today that mutes a subject across future briefs. If a recurring subject is generating items you never want, the levers that exist are the type filters above, and which accounts you connect.
When work and personal email share an inbox
This is the most common source of noise in a brief, and it is worth naming as the cause rather than treating each item as a mistake. If one inbox carries both your work and your life, Brief reads both, and it has no way to know which half you meant. Family travel plans arrive next to a contract renewal because they arrived next to each other.
Two things help. Connect the accounts you want read rather than every account you own, under Settings → Connections. Brief supports several accounts at once, including several from the same provider, so a work Google account and a personal one can both be connected, or only one of them. See Connecting your data sources.
Then use the type filters to cut whichever category the personal traffic tends to land in.
Topics
The Topics page groups related work into subjects Brief has recognized across your sources. A topic there can be hidden or dismissed, which takes it out of your topic list. Use it for a topic Brief has assembled that is not really a thing you work on.
Hiding a topic is a correction to your topic list. Treat it as tidying that list rather than as a way to change what tomorrow's email contains.
If the brief is still not right
Tell us. The extraction behind the brief is tuned against real reader feedback, and "this section is redundant" or "this item should never have been here" is more useful to the team than a filter you set silently. See Contacting support.