What Are Claude Skills — and How to Use Them for Daily Planning

Most people use Claude as a very good improviser. You describe the situation, it responds, you nudge it, it gets there. That works — and it is the reason your results are slightly different every single day.

A skill is the fix. It is a folder with instructions that Claude loads when the situation matches. Same input, same procedure, same shape of output. For anything you do daily — planning, triage, weekly review — that consistency is the whole value.

At minimum: a name, a description of when to use it, and a body of instructions. The description matters more than people expect — that is what Claude reads to decide whether the skill is relevant right now. Vague description, skill never fires.

• Name — short and specific: «daily-planning», not «productivity».
• Description — the trigger: «Use when the user asks to plan their day, week, or asks what to work on next.»
• Instructions — the procedure, written as steps, including what to read and what to output.
• Optional files — checklists, templates, scripts the skill can reference.

A prompt is one-off. A Claude Project holds context for a set of related conversations. A skill is a procedure that travels across projects and fires automatically when it fits. Use all three: the project holds your Notion schema, the skill holds how you plan, the prompt is just «plan my day».

This is the one worth building first, because it runs every morning. Assume Claude is already connected to Notion via MCP.

1. 1Read the task database. Pull everything that is not Done, grouped by project.
2. 2Surface blocked work first — anything with status Waiting, with how long it has been waiting.
3. 3Identify the top 20 percent: the tasks that move a deadline or unblock another person. Name them explicitly as high-leverage.
4. 4Match tasks to energy. Deep work goes into the window I marked as high energy; admin and follow-ups go into the low window.
5. 5Return exactly three focus tasks, a short waiting list, and one sentence on what I should say no to today.
6. 6Never invent tasks that are not in the database. Never mark anything Done.

In Claude desktop, skills live in the Skills section of settings — create one, paste the instructions, save. In Claude Code, a skill is a folder containing a markdown file with front matter for name and description; drop it in the skills directory and it is available in the next session. Either way, test it by asking a question that should trigger it and checking that Claude announces the skill.

• Brain-dump triage — takes an unstructured voice transcript and turns it into tasks with the right project, one task per line, nothing invented.
• Weekly review — reads the last seven days, reports what actually moved, and names the one project that slipped.
• Waiting-on follow-up — finds everything blocked on someone else for more than four days and drafts the nudge message.

• The skill never fires: the description is too abstract. Write it as the user's actual words.
• Output drifts: the instructions describe a goal instead of a procedure. Number the steps.
• It hallucinates tasks: add an explicit «only use items returned from Notion» line. This is not optional.
• It does too much: one skill, one job. Split planning and triage.

Skills are still new enough that most people have not written one. That is exactly why writing three is worth an afternoon — the compounding starts immediately and nobody else in your team has it yet.