Today's Agent Skill: Turn Any Document Into a Task List
What It Does
You get a 12-page vendor contract, a rambling Slack thread, or a strategy deck, and somewhere inside it are four things you personally have to do. Finding them means reading the whole thing twice and still missing one. This skill reads any document and returns only the commitments that belong to you, with owners and dates attached.
How It Works
The agent scans the source text for commitment language — obligations, deadlines, conditional triggers, and assigned responsibilities — then separates them from background context and other people's tasks. Each extracted item gets an owner, a due date (explicit or inferred), and a verbatim source quote so you can verify it without rereading the original. Ambiguous items get flagged rather than guessed at.
How to Deploy It
Save the block below as `SKILL.md` in a folder named `action-extractor/` inside your agent's skills directory, then paste or attach any document and say "extract my action items." It works unmodified on Claude Code, Cursor, or any agent that reads SKILL.md files from a skills folder.
SKILL.md — Ready to Deploy
## Description
Extracts actionable commitments from unstructured documents — contracts, meeting transcripts, email threads, project briefs, slide decks — and returns them as a verified task list with owners, dates, and source quotes. Distinguishes real obligations from discussion, speculation, and tasks assigned to other people.
## Trigger
Activate when the user pastes or attaches a document and asks for action items, next steps, deliverables, commitments, or "what do I need to do." Also activate on: extract tasks, what are my to-dos from this, pull the deadlines, who owes what.
## Input
- **Required:** Document text (pasted, attached, or file path)
- **Optional:** `owner_filter` — a name or role; returns only that person's items
- **Optional:** `reference_date` — the date to anchor relative terms like "next Friday" against. Defaults to today.
## Steps
1. Read the full document before extracting anything. Do not stream results while reading.
2. Identify every sentence containing commitment language: will, must, shall, agrees to, is responsible for, by [date], before [event], owes, needs to deliver.
3. For each candidate, determine the owner. Use explicit names first. If the Copy the full SKILL.md and drop it into your agent's skills directory to activate this skill.