Today's Agent Skill: Action Item Extractor
What It Does
After every meeting, call, or long email thread, important next steps get buried in paragraphs of prose — and someone always drops the ball. Manually rereading content to pull out tasks is tedious, error-prone, and eats into focused work time. This skill gives your agent a dedicated pass to surface every commitment, owner, and deadline from any unstructured text.
How It Works
The skill instructs the agent to scan input text for language patterns that signal commitment, obligation, or delegation — phrases like 'will', 'should', 'by Friday', 'please handle', or 'let's make sure'. It categorizes each item by owner (if named), deadline (if stated or inferable), and priority (high/medium/low based on urgency language), then formats them as a clean, copy-paste-ready task list.
How to Deploy It
Drop the SKILL.md content into your agent's skills directory and name it `action-item-extractor.md`. Trigger it by pasting any email, call transcript, or document and saying 'extract action items' — the agent returns a structured task list ready for your project management tool or follow-up email.
SKILL.md — Ready to Deploy
## Description
Scans unstructured text (emails, call transcripts, meeting notes, documents) for action items, commitments, and next steps. Produces a structured, owner-tagged task list ready for handoff to a PM tool or follow-up email.
## Trigger
User says: "extract action items", "pull out tasks", "what are the next steps", "who owes what", or pastes text followed by "action items please".
## Input
- Required: Raw text block (email body, transcript excerpt, notes paste)
- Optional: Default owner name (for items with no named assignee), due-date anchor (e.g., "today is Monday June 9")
## Steps
1. Read the full input text in a single pass.
2. Identify sentences or clauses containing commitment signals: modal verbs (will, should, must, need to), delegation language (please, can you, assigned to, owned by), and deadline markers (by EOD, before the meeting, next week, Friday).
3. For each identified item, extract:
- Task description (verb-forward, one clause)
- Owner (named person, team, or "[unassigned]")
- Deadline (explicit date/time, relative anchor, or "[none stated]")
- Priority (high = explicit urgency or blocker language; medium = standard commitment; low = nice-Copy the full SKILL.md and drop it into your agent's skills directory to activate this skill.