start-the-day

name	start-the-day
description	Morning ADHD-focus ritual. Opens (or creates) today's Daily note, then runs the surface-stale-tasks skill, then asks whether you want to prep for any meetings today (you check your own diary and name them - there's no calendar read access), running the prep-meeting skill once per meeting you name. Trigger: /start-the-day or "start the day" / "kick off my morning".

Start the Day

Purpose

A focus tool, not a status report. Prioritisation happens in your task manager, not here - the Daily note doesn't try to mirror a "today's focus" checkbox list. This skill is an orchestrator only - it does no work itself beyond opening the Daily note; the actual staleness check and meeting prep live in their own standalone skills (surface-stale-tasks, prep-meeting) that this one calls in sequence.

Why split into smaller skills

This used to be one skill doing three jobs. It's been split so that each job is independently useful: you might want a stale-task check mid-afternoon without running the whole morning ritual, or want to prep one extra meeting that gets added to your diary after lunch, without repeating everything else. Splitting also keeps each skill's own job statable in one sentence, which makes each one easier to trust and to edit later without touching the others. See the repo README's "One skill, one job" principle - this pattern is meant to generalise to whatever skills you add later, not just apply here.

Why a separate task manager at all

An earlier version of this skill (and the Tasks plugin Obsidian setup it was built on) kept everything - notes and tasks - inside the vault, with Dataview/Tasks queries doing the surfacing. That works, and if it works for you, keep it: skip this skill's task-manager-integration steps and just use end-the-day against vault-native #task checkboxes instead (see that skill's notes).

The author moved task tracking out to a dedicated app (Things3, on macOS) because a note-taking tool and a task manager are optimising for different things: a real task manager gives you due-date notifications, recurring tasks, and capture from anywhere (phone, watch, car) without needing Obsidian open, none of which a markdown checkbox in a note does well. The tradeoff is one more system to keep in sync - these skills make that sync asymmetric and cheap: they only ever read from the task manager and never write back, so there's one direction of truth and no risk of Claude quietly diverging from what you actually asked your task manager to track.

This part is intentionally pluggable. surface-stale-tasks and prep-meeting describe the pattern (export/query task data, apply staleness thresholds, filter by tag) rather than a specific tool. Wherever they say "your task manager," substitute whatever you use - Things3 via AppleScript (the author's setup; see skills/things3-export/ for example scripts you'd adapt), Todoist/TickTick via their APIs, Reminders.app, or anything else that can hand Claude a plain-text or JSON export of open items with creation/due dates and tags.

Trigger

/start-the-day, or asking to start/kick off your day/morning.

Process

1. Find or create today's Daily note.

   • Path: 📝 Notes/🗓️ Daily notes/YYYY-MM-DD.md (today's date).
   • If it exists, read it - don't clobber anything already written under ## Notes or elsewhere.
   • If it doesn't exist, create it using the current ⚙️ Templates/Daily.md as the structure (read the template fresh each time rather than hardcoding it here - it may change). Compute the date/time directly rather than relying on Templater, since this file is being written directly.
   • Do not write a task list into the Daily note - your task manager is the source of truth for what's on today's plate, and mirroring it here is duplicated maintenance for no benefit.

2. Run the surface-stale-tasks skill. Present its output as-is - don't re-derive or second-guess it here.

3. Ask if there's anything on today's diary worth prepping for. There's no calendar read access - look at your own diary and name the meeting (and who it's with, if relevant). Don't try to guess or infer the schedule. Work through meetings one at a time, conversationally - don't ask for the whole day's agenda up front.

   • For each meeting named, run the prep-meeting skill. That skill handles finding/creating the meeting note, pulling matching tasks by tag, and linking it into today's Daily note - this step is just the loop that invokes it once per named meeting.

4. Don't mark anything done in your task manager, don't invent new tasks, don't reorganise unrelated parts of the note. This is a read-and-surface ritual, not a cleanup or prioritisation step - any actual changes to task state are the user's to make themselves, in the tool that owns that state.

Notes on conventions (see the vault's CLAUDE.md for the full set)

• If you're using an external task manager, task tracking lives there, not in the vault - the Daily note doesn't mirror a task list.
• Flat tags only, never nested, for Obsidian notes. Your task manager's tags are a separate system and don't need to match that convention.
• No em-dashes in anything written into notes - hyphens instead (edit to taste).
• Never offer to edit your task manager on the user's behalf, even as a convenience - these skills only ever read from it.