Today's Agent Skill: Action Item Extractor
What It Does
You finish a two-hour strategy session and immediately lose track of who's doing what by when. Action items scatter across email threads, Slack messages, and meeting notes — and they die there. This skill gives your agent a standing order to hunt, standardize, and surface every commitment before it slips.
How It Works
The skill scans a batch of raw inputs — meeting notes, email chains, or chat transcripts — and extracts structured action items with owner, task, due date, and source context. It resolves relative dates, deduplicates overlapping commitments, and outputs a sorted checklist ready to drop into any project tracker.
How to Deploy It
Drop this SKILL.md into your agent's skill directory (typically ~/.claude/skills/ or .claude/skills/ in your repo). Trigger it by pasting any block of meeting text, email thread, or chat export and saying 'extract action items from this.'
SKILL.md — Ready to Deploy
## Description
Scans unstructured text — meeting notes, email chains, Slack exports, or voice memo transcripts — and extracts every action item into a normalized, owner-attributed checklist. Eliminates the manual step of rereading content to find commitments buried in prose.
## Trigger
User pastes or pipes text containing "extract action items" or "pull action items from this."
## Input
- Raw text block: meeting notes, email thread, chat transcript, or any prose document
- Optional: today's date (for resolving relative dates like "by Friday")
- Optional: list of known team members (improves owner attribution accuracy)
## Steps
1. Read the full input text without truncating.
2. Identify every sentence or clause that contains a commitment, task assignment, or follow-up obligation — look for modal verbs (will, should, needs to, going to), imperative phrases ("please send," "make sure to"), and deadline signals ("by EOD," "before the call").
3. For each identified commitment, extract:
- **Owner** — the person responsible (infer from context if not explicit; use "TBD" if truly ambiguous)
- **Task** — the specific action in plain language, under 15 words
- **Due date** — convCopy the full SKILL.md and drop it into your agent's skills directory to activate this skill.