My boss likes his direct reports to send him a weekly update, in a specific format, every Monday. The update should cover my team’s accomplishments from the last week, what we’re intending to deliver in the week ahead, and a short summary of any significant events and requests for help. Ideally, everything should be lined up with the relevant objective in our company’s annual plan. Not an unreasonable ask, and probably quite a common one.

But a major time sink.

I have 8 direct reports. If they all produce comprehensive updates — and everyone likes to look productive, or at least busy, after all — then that’s hundreds of words to wade through. Even with a prescriptive format, specifics will differ from update to update. Not everyone will use the exact same description for each objective. Some people will forget to include them. Summarising all of this, highlighting the most relevant content, adding my own updates and then double-checking that we hadn’t missed anything — failing to share an update on something major that we said we’d be doing during the last week, for example — takes a long time. The output is valuable, even for me, but the process is not. It’s a chore.

Enter my favourite AI co-worker. I had recently learned about ‘skills’, tools to get Claude to complete certain tasks in a particular way. This task felt like a good place to try one out — perhaps I could accelerate this process and save myself time each week?

A skill is a little like a piece of software — a set of instructions that Claude will follow to accomplish a goal. But, unlike conventional software, you don’t need to know how to code. Tell Claude you want to write a skill, and then tell it in plain English what you want, and it will write it for you. You can manually write the instructions if you want, but in my experience it’s easier just to ask Claude to do it.

I told Claude what I needed to do, and I asked it to create a skill that would:

  • Let me paste in a stream of updates from my team — copy/pasting the Slacks they send me
  • Summarise the stream into six or seven accomplishments and the same number of highlights for the week ahead, including a reference to the person who made the update at the end of each summary. I specifically asked it to include any updates that felt worth sharing with my boss.
  • Align each update with the correct annual goal. (I gave it a list of these for reference.)
  • Let me review the summary, and decide which updates to include, and whether to make any changes to the content or the goal alignment
  • Let me add my own updates
  • Cross-reference the update from last week to see if we’d neglected to mention something important
  • Output a formatted response that I can copy-paste into Slack for my boss

Setting up the skill took maybe 20–30 mins. And then it worked, first time.

It’s not always perfect — sometimes it spits out summaries that don’t ring entirely true, but because I have the attribution I can go back to the source and double check what my team actually wrote. Sometimes it gets the wrong goal alignment; usually it’s spot on. And it always notices when we forget to update on something we highlighted the week before.

That small investment means a process that took 45 mins every week now takes just ten. More importantly, I can actually focus on the content of my team’s updates, instead of summarising and copy-editing. Most of the content isn’t truly news, of course — I learn the majority of it through conversations with my team during the week — but there are occasional late-breaking surprises, gaps in my understanding of what was going on, or things that slipped through the cracks. Instead of rushing to get an update done on a Monday morning, I now have the time to dig deeper; the updates are helping me, as well as my boss.

This is a simple but strong example of agentic AI at its best. The weekly update is work that I was already doing, and knew how to do well, but where the real value in the work was not in the organisation or writing of the documentation, but in the thinking that drove those processes. Claude’s new skill helps me automate a lot of the work, sure, but the real benefit is in shifting the balance of my work so that I have more time to do the bits where I really add value. More time to think, to interrogate, to develop the right plans and follow-up actions.

I’ve since written a skill to help me organise my week — especially helpful to make sure I don’t forget to do important but non-urgent tasks that I need to get done each month or each quarter — and my team have produced skills for writing requirements documents, accelerating the design/build/review loop and many more. Each of those tasks follows a simple formula — they’re repetitive, they take structured input, ‘good’ output is reasonably easy to define, and most importantly the value of the work is in the judgement, not the assembly.

What are your ‘oh my god, I can’t believe I’m having to wade through this again’ tasks? What do you wish you could spend less time wrangling, and more time thinking about how to present or shape? There’s a Claude skill waiting to be written, right there.