OpenClaw Quick Start: Run Your First Automation in Under 10 Minutes

I set up Openclaw that day. I just wanted my scattered "don't forget" notes to stop slipping between Messages, email, and Slack. Sunday evening, mild dread, one too many stray tasks, that's what nudged me into an "okay, fine, let's try this" moment. I went looking for an Openclaw quick start that wouldn't swallow the night. If you prefer a more complete, step-by-step installation walkthrough before trimming things down, this Openclaw install guide covers the full setup path.

What follows is the short path I took, what actually worked, and a simple recipe that turned out to be enough to prove it's worth keeping around, at least for now.

What success looks like

Your first automation outcome

If you're anything like me, you don't need Openclaw to reorganize your life. You want one small win that makes tomorrow a touch smoother. For a quick first outcome, I aimed for this: capture todos from messages throughout the day and get a single, readable daily summary at a set time. Nothing fancy. No dashboards. Just a small offloading of mental load.

In practice, "success" looked like this on my end:

A short list of tasks that appeared where I already look (a notes file, or a lightweight task doc).
A daily summary message I could skim in under a minute.
No extra tabs to remember, no new inbox.

When I ran it the first time, I didn't save time immediately. What surprised me was the mental quiet: I stopped re-reading threads to make sure I hadn't missed a promise I made to future-me. That's the feeling I'm after with tools like this.

3 checks to confirm it's working

I used three quick checks before I trusted it:

Source to capture: Send yourself a message with two clear tasks embedded ("Send invoice to Mira," "Book dentist appointment") and confirm those exact lines land in your chosen list, un-mangled, spelled correctly enough, and without extra fluff.
Time-bound summary: Trigger a summary run (manual or scheduled) and make sure the output is short, readable, and grouped by context. If you have to decode it, it's not helping.
Round-trip sanity: Mark one captured task as done and watch the next summary. It should not re-surface the completed item as "open." If it does, your filters aren't set quite right. A few tweaks here matter more than you'd expect.

The 10-minute setup path

Step 1: Install (3 minutes)

I went for the least fiddly install path available: containerized if you prefer isolation, or a single package install if your machine is already set up for dev tools. If the official docs suggest Docker, that's usually the fastest way to avoid version pinball. Either way, my timer said three minutes from "decide" to "it runs hello-world."

Two small notes:

Keep your terminal open after install: you'll likely need to paste an API key soon.
If you hit a permissions error, don't wrestle, run the recommended fix from the docs and move on. The goal is momentum, not elegance.

Step 2: Configure basics (2 minutes)

Openclaw's basics come down to three things: where to read from, where to write to, and how to authenticate. I created a simple environment file with only the essentials, no optional flags, no tuning.

What I filled in:

A single input source (one messaging channel you actually use, not three "somedays").
One output sink (a notes file or doc you already check daily).
A time window (the hours you want Openclaw to watch) and a summary time (I picked 5:30pm).

If you can keep this to five or six lines, you're on the right track.

Step 3: Connect one model (2 minutes)

For the model, I started with something boring and reliable, the kind you can access with a single API key and a default model name. If you have a local model you like, great. If not, a hosted LLM gets you moving quickly. Paste the key, set a conservative temperature (you want consistency for summaries), and leave everything else alone for now.

Tiny quality-of-life tip: add a short system-style instruction that clarifies tone and format. Mine is one sentence: "Extract actionable tasks in bullet points: write a 4–6 sentence daily summary grouped by context." That one line does more than eight tuning parameters.

Step 4: Run the automation (3 minutes)

I kicked off a first run manually. No cron. No scheduled job. Just a one-off to see if the pipes connect.

What I looked for on the first run:

Clear logs: Did it authenticate, read something, and write something?
Idempotence-ish behavior: If I ran it again immediately, would it duplicate the same tasks? If yes, add a basic "seen" filter or timestamp cutoff.
Human-readability: If the output felt like mush, I adjusted the instruction line, not the model.

Once the manual run behaved, I scheduled it for a specific time. That was the first moment I felt the "okay, this might stick" flicker.

Your first automation recipe

Recipe: Capture tasks from messages + daily summary

This is the smallest possible recipe that earned its keep for me:

Input: One messaging stream you already use daily (email label, Slack channel, or an SMS-forwarding setup). Keep it scoped. I used a single filtered source so it wouldn't hoover everything.
Processing: Extract action items and short context from new messages within the last 24 hours. Skip anything older unless you want a backlog dump.
Output: Append unique tasks to a running list you actually open (for me, a daily notes doc), and generate a short end-of-day summary posted to the same place or sent as a DM.

It's not magic. But it's the exact thing I was doing manually, just a bit more faithful and less tiring.

Copy-paste configuration

If you like starting from a template, here's the minimal shape I used, written out in plain language so you can drop it into whatever config format Openclaw expects:

Input source: type = "messages", provider = "your-channel-here", filter = "mentions your name OR messages with checkmarks OR emails with label ‘Action'", lookback = "24h"
LLM: provider = "your-preferred-model", model = "stable-default", temperature = 0.2, instruction = "Extract actionable tasks (who/what/when if present), ignore greetings, keep bullets short. Then write a 4–6 sentence daily summary grouped by context (People, Projects, Admin)."
De-duplication: strategy = "hash message id + sentence", window = "48h"
Outputs: tasks_destination = "append to running list (path/to/notes or document id)": summary_destination = "post to same doc under heading ‘Daily Summary – ' or send DM to me"
Schedule: summary_time = "17:30 local": manual_trigger = "enabled"

That's it. If you find yourself adding more than a handful of lines before your first run, you're probably over-optimizing. I say this as someone who's very good at inventing edge cases I'll never meet.

How to test it end-to-end

I ran a silly but effective three-message test:

Send a message that clearly contains a task ("Anna: send revised proposal to Nikhil by Thursday").
Send a message with no task ("Thanks, received"). This should not appear anywhere.
Send a mixed note ("Lunch with Priya moved to Friday. Also remind me to cancel the duplicate calendar hold."), only the reminder should end up as a task: the lunch move can land in the summary context.

Then I forced a run and checked:

Did the task list contain exactly the two actionable bullets, no more, no less?
Did the summary feel like something I'd actually read?
If I ran it twice, did it avoid duplicating the same items?

It took maybe eight minutes end-to-end, with one minute of minor annoyance when I realized my filter was too loose and pulled in a "lol" thread. Tightening the filter fixed it.

Make it actually usable

Connect one messaging channel

Pick the path of least resistance. If your life lives in email, use a single label or folder you can forward into. If it's Slack, one channel you genuinely check. SMS works if you have a way to forward to a webhook or inbox Openclaw can read. The point is to reduce noise, not to build a master control center.

A tiny guardrail that helped me: only messages that mention my name or contain verbs like "send, schedule, draft, follow up" make it through. That one tweak cut my false positives by a lot.

Set up your preferred AI model

I tried two models back-to-back on the same inputs. The difference wasn't speed: it was tone and consistency. For daily summaries, I'd trade cleverness for predictability every time. Lower temperature, a short instruction about format, and a strict word budget produced the most reliable output. If you're curious, test for 24 hours and switch if the voice feels off.

One more practical thing: keep your API key in an environment variable, not hard-coded. Future-you will thank you when you rotate it.

I'll keep running this Openclaw quick start setup for a bit. If it keeps catching those small "don't forget"s without me babysitting it, it stays. If not, I'll know within a week, my summaries have a way of telling on me.

If you’re just trying to stop small tasks from slipping through chats and inboxes, setting up and maintaining automations can start to feel like another job. We built Macaron to let you run and manage AI task flows in one place, without stitching together configs and scripts. Try it with your next workflow →