Today's Agent Skill: Turning Any Document Into a Tracked Action List
What It Does
Every week, decisions get buried inside documents nobody re-reads — project briefs, requirement docs, contract redlines, retro notes. The commitments are in there, but they're phrased as prose, not as tasks, so they quietly never happen. This skill reads any document and extracts every actual commitment into a tracked list with owners and deadlines.
How It Works
The agent scans a document for commitment language — obligations, assignments, deadlines, conditional promises — and distinguishes those from background context and discussion. Each extracted item gets an owner, a due date (explicit or inferred), and a confidence flag when the source text is ambiguous. Anything unattributed goes into a separate unassigned bucket instead of being silently dropped or invented.
How to Deploy It
Save the skill body below as `SKILL.md` inside a folder named `document-action-extraction/` in your agent's skills directory, then reference the document path or paste its contents when you invoke it. Any SKILL.md-compatible agent will pick up the trigger phrases automatically — no wiring or configuration needed.
SKILL.md — Ready to Deploy
## Description
Extracts every actionable commitment from a document into a structured, owner-attributed task list. Works on project briefs, requirement docs, contracts, retro notes, RFCs, and meeting minutes. Distinguishes real obligations from discussion, background, and hypotheticals — and never invents an owner or date that isn't in the source.
## Trigger
Fires on: "extract action items", "what do I owe from this doc", "pull the tasks out of this", "turn this into a task list", "what are the commitments here", "who owes what in this document". Also fires when a user pastes a long document and asks "what do I need to do" without naming an extraction task.
## Input
- **Required:** document text, or a file path the agent can read.
- **Optional:** a roster of known people/teams for owner normalization.
- **Optional:** a reference date for resolving relative deadlines ("end of next week"). Defaults to today.
## Steps
1. Read the full document before extracting anything. Do not stream out items as you scan — partial passes miss commitments that are qualified later in the text.
2. Flag every sentence containing commitment language: will, must, needs to, owns, is responsible for,Copy the full SKILL.md and drop it into your agent's skills directory to activate this skill.