I describe how I use morning messages here:

http://board.43folders.com/showthread.php?t=311

"I have a hack which I wanted to share. At the end of each day, I write a page to myself:

"Good Morning duus! The first thing you should do in the morning is go to the gym, and listen to this podcast. Remember, you want to learn about X.

When you get to work, start on project Y. That means opening the textfile yTasks.txt. Remember, you want to finish a draft of Y by the end of the week, so you want to finish at least the first four tasks today. ...."

And so on. Then I program myself in the morning to do a small set of things, and then read the page, before I turn on the computer, before I do other things, before I've already wasted half the day surfing the web. (Uh, i'm a grad student.)

I keep the page throughout the day, and consult it. It's refreshingly narrative and low-tech and concise. Probably more useful for the people who are doing many long-term, largely self-driven projects like myself."

I have also automated this: I have a TextMate Project called "PJMorn" (i begin all my textmate projects with "PJ" so that they are quickly identified in QuickSilver) which contains, among other things:

morningmessage.txt
nextmorningmessage.txt

and I run a script called "morn" that, among other things, copies the nextmorningmessage.txt to morningmessage.txt, makes a new time-stamped morningmessage, and archives the old one.

here is the code (bash script):

http://www.umich.edu/~apape/Rice/43folders/