Urgent-watch: allows me to close Slack and email, and have Claude run a loop in the background to check every 30 mins if there is anything time-sensitive that means I should exit deep work and reply to things.
Gdoc2md: I work mainly in Google Docs, often with many comments, and the native ‘download as markdown’ feature loses the comments. So I have a skill that take a doc url and downloads it as a word file, which Claude can parse to extract the comments and format them as footnotes in a clean md file for other Claudes to read and edit.
Memo: When I want Claude to do some macrostrategy research/​writing, it reads a detailed summary of my org’s beliefs, values, plans, etc. The summary links to many more markdown files with detailed takes on relevant topics. Interestingly, telling Claude to read all the memos and then write something on a new topic produces worse results than just reading the summary and the few most relevant memos.
Biggest one for me is the meta-skill of asking it to make skills for tasks I want it to do in more than one chat. I can now make an early draft of the EA Newsletter almost entirely with a chain of claude skills.
Edit: ‘early draft’ because they are each a bit crap in their own way. They do get better every month though.
Three Claude Code skills I find helpful:
Urgent-watch: allows me to close Slack and email, and have Claude run a loop in the background to check every 30 mins if there is anything time-sensitive that means I should exit deep work and reply to things.
Gdoc2md: I work mainly in Google Docs, often with many comments, and the native ‘download as markdown’ feature loses the comments. So I have a skill that take a doc url and downloads it as a word file, which Claude can parse to extract the comments and format them as footnotes in a clean md file for other Claudes to read and edit.
Memo: When I want Claude to do some macrostrategy research/​writing, it reads a detailed summary of my org’s beliefs, values, plans, etc. The summary links to many more markdown files with detailed takes on relevant topics. Interestingly, telling Claude to read all the memos and then write something on a new topic produces worse results than just reading the summary and the few most relevant memos.
Biggest one for me is the meta-skill of asking it to make skills for tasks I want it to do in more than one chat. I can now make an early draft of the EA Newsletter almost entirely with a chain of claude skills.
Edit: ‘early draft’ because they are each a bit crap in their own way. They do get better every month though.