Build a Work “Second Brain” That Updates Itself (Town Tutorial)

Go to town.com (https://www.town.com/), click Sign Up, and connect the Slack workspace where you want to use Town.

Town will walk you through a set of starter routines. Begin with only the ones tied to work you already do. The recording starts with Auto-inbox, Morning Briefing, and Meeting Briefing.

Review the options inside each routine before moving on. For example, Auto-inbox can include separate actions for labeling mail, assisting with scheduling, or drafting replies. You decide which options are enabled; the routine then produces the recurring output attached to those choices.

You can change these settings later, so resist the urge to enable everything during onboarding.

Open Town's connection setup and choose the sources that contain useful work context. That might include Notion pages, a Google account, Granola meeting notes, or Calendly bookings.

Treat each connection as a permission decision. Review what Town can access, add only the pages or accounts it needs, and leave private messages or unrelated sources disconnected. If you do not want Town looking at Slack DMs, do not grant that access.

Connecting a source gives Town permission to use that information. It does not make every output correct, so you will review the Wiki before relying on any routine.

Open the browser dashboard and select Wiki. Review the sections Town has created for your work, such as your overview, goals, projects, profile, notes, and people.

Start with the facts that are most likely to affect a routine: your current projects, responsibilities, communication preferences, and the people you work with. If anything is missing or inaccurate, treat the Wiki as unfinished context and do not use that section to guide important work.

Do not expect one review to create perfect context. The goal is to make Town's understanding visible so you can catch problems before they appear in a briefing, report, or action.

Open the town-square channel in Slack and tag @Town when you send a request. Start with a low-risk status check:

What tasks are you working on? Any blockers?

Review the response before asking Town to take an action. A status report is an output you can inspect; creating a calendar event or changing another tool is an action that may require your approval.

Next, ask Town to reserve a daily review window and gather the reports you need to check:

Find me a recurring time every day and block out 45 minutes for me to read reports generated by AI agents on all research tasks and operational tasks. Set up an automation so that the reports are gathered and linked in that calendar event description every day.

Approve only the calendar action you requested, then verify the recurring block, its timing, and the links in the event description. This creates a place to review the work instead of letting reports disappear across different apps and threads.

Pro tip: Town may need your approval the first time it takes an action in Slack, so approve the request before expecting the task to run.

Open Routines to see what is already running before you add anything new.

Ask Town to recommend a short list based on the context you just reviewed:

Based on what you know about me, recommend the top three automations we can set up to make my job easier.

Choose one suggestion, inspect what it will read and what it will do, then test it with a low-risk task. Review the result during your daily 45-minute block and give feedback on whether it was useful. Add the next routine only after the first one is producing something worth keeping.

This is the difference between collecting automations and building a dependable system: each routine earns its place through a result you have checked.