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Difficulty: Beginner • Time: 30 minutes • Tools: Claude Code, Claude Desktop

Note: This guide is still marked draft: true on the site — treat as a work-in-progress version.

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You check the same three things every morning: email for anything urgent, news for your industry, calendar to figure out what needs prep. Twenty minutes, on autopilot — which is exactly why you keep doing it, because it doesn't feel like a problem.

But it is one. Twenty minutes of low-value repetition, five days a week, is nearly two hours gone before you've done any real work. And the worst part: it's the kind of work Claude is genuinely good at. Scanning, filtering, summarizing, flagging things that need attention. The pattern-matching grunt work that humans tolerate and AI thrives on.

Claude Desktop has a feature called Scheduled Tasks. You write a prompt, pick a time, and Claude runs it automatically — every morning, every Friday, every hour if you want. The results are ready when you open the app.

Before you start

You'll need Claude Desktop (the installed app, not the web version — Scheduled Tasks don't exist there), Claude Code for writing and testing your skill, and a task you actually repeat. If you haven't set up Claude Code yet, start with the CLAUDE.md setup guide in this Member Hub first.

Step 1: Find the repetition

Open a blank document or notes app. Write down what you did in the first thirty minutes of your last three workdays. Not what you should have done — what you actually did.

Look for anything that shows up more than once. Common patterns:

• Morning scan — checking email, Slack, news, calendar
• Status check — looking at project dashboards, open tasks, team updates
• Content routine — scanning for industry news, drafting social posts
• Weekly prep — pulling together meeting agendas, progress summaries
• Maintenance — checking for software updates, reviewing reports or logs

You're looking for tasks where the steps are the same even if the content changes. "Check email and flag anything that needs a reply" is the same steps every time — only the emails change. That's what makes it automatable.

Don't start with your most complex workflow. Pick something simple with clear inputs and outputs. "Summarize my unread email" is a better first task than "process my entire inbox, file attachments, create follow-up tasks, and update my CRM."

Step 2: Write it as a prompt

Before you build a skill file, test your task as a regular prompt. Open a Claude Code session and type what you'd want done, as if you were explaining it to a capable assistant on their first day.

Good prompt:

Check my calendar for today using AppleScript. For each meeting,
tell me who it's with, when it starts, and what I should prepare
based on the meeting title. Flag anything in the next 2 hours.