n8n Workflow: Send Project Deadline Digest Emails (Gmail + Sheets)

Never miss a project deadline—get an automatic weekday email digest from your Google Sheets

This n8n workflow reads upcoming project deadlines from Google Sheets, filters items due in the next 7 days (including overdue and due today), and sends a single consolidated HTML email via Gmail to keep your team focused. It also flags invalid deadline dates and skips any closed/completed projects.

What this workflow does

• Runs on weekdays at 08:00 (or you can start it manually in demo mode).
• Loads rows from the Deadlines sheet in Google Sheets (or generates fictional rows for safe testing).
• Validates deadline dates in YYYY-MM-DD format; invalid dates are counted and included in a warning section.
• Skips closed/completed projects based on the status column.
• Calculates days remaining and keeps only deadlines due within the next 7 days.
• Sorts by urgency and builds a single consolidated HTML digest with counts.
• Sends through Gmail for scheduled runs, or returns the email subject + HTML as JSON for demo runs.
• Stops cleanly when there are no relevant deadlines to report.

Use cases

• SaaS operators monitoring deliverables: “Send a daily digest of what’s due soon.”
• Automation engineers testing schedule + email logic using demo mode and fictional deadline data.
• Teams tracking work in Google Sheets and needing Gmail notifications without building a custom app.

Technical details

• Google Sheets (OAuth2): reads from a sheet named Deadlines with columns like project_id, project_name, deadline, owner_email, status, priority, and next_step.
• Gmail (OAuth2): sends the consolidated HTML digest to a configured recipient.
• n8n nodes: if, code, gmail, google sheets, and manual trigger (plus a sticky note for guidance).