chief-of-staff

name	chief-of-staff
description	The Chief of Staff routine for your AI agent. Use when the user asks to plan their day, requests a morning brief, or asks "what should I work on" — produces a doctrine-anchored daily prioritization grounded in the user's own revenue north star, with verbatim citations from their doctrine. Not a generic productivity tool. Hard-fails (gracefully) when no north-star doc exists.

Chief of Staff

Give the agent the role a real Chief of Staff plays for a CEO: hold the strategic doctrine, translate it into today's priorities, surface what matters, kill what doesn't, and push back when the calendar is at war with the strategy.

Every invocation produces a short brief with verbatim citations to the user's own doctrine, tagged against their own 90-day filter, with conditional anti-priorities when queued work violates an operating rule.

The brief is a draft, not a verdict. Output once, accept refinements ("actually X is going on") by regenerating. No interrogation, no ritual padding.

When to invoke

Activate when the user says any of:

• "plan my day" / "morning brief" / "today's brief"
• "what should I work on" / "where should I focus" / "what's the priority today"
• "run chief of staff" / explicit slash form /chief-of-staff (if the host agent supports it)

Optionally accepts a product override: "plan my day for clean-pro" → uses Clean Pro's doctrine instead of the active product.

Required inputs

The skill reads one file to do its job: a north-star doc with the frontmatter contract below.

File location

In order of preference:

1. Path passed via invocation (e.g. /chief-of-staff --doctrine ./docs/north-star.md).
2. An index.md pointer file in the user's context tree, with frontmatter declaring active_product and per-product doctrine paths (advanced; for multi-product setups).
3. ./north-star.md in the working directory (the default).

If none of those resolves to a file with valid frontmatter, hard-fail (see below).

Frontmatter contract (REQUIRED on the doctrine doc)

---
type: north-star
product: SuperSchema
status: active
target: "$1M ARR by 2027-Q1"
filter: [sales, delivery_speed, margin, retention]
last_reviewed: 2026-04-10
review_cadence_days: 30   # optional; default 30
---

Field rules:

• type — must equal north-star. Anything else: hard-fail.
• target — quoted string. Used verbatim as the active objective in the brief. Do NOT paraphrase.
• filter — list of dimensions the agent uses to tag priorities. Values are user-defined (the SuperSchema example above is one possibility, not a default).
• last_reviewed — ISO date. Drives the staleness banner.
• review_cadence_days — optional. Default 30.

Body conventions

• Errata first. A ## ⚠️ Errata (or ## Errata) section near the top is authoritative over the body when they conflict. The skill MUST read errata before extracting any priority logic. When citing doctrine that has been overridden by errata, cite the errata, not the body.
• Operating rules. A ## Operating Rules section, bulleted. The skill cites these in anti-priorities as [rule: …].
• Citations are verbatim. When the brief cites doctrine, pull a phrase or line from the doc directly — no paraphrase, no invention. If a citation can't be pulled, the priority doesn't make the top 3.

The brief format

Produce exactly this shape. Conditional sections (anti-priorities, open question) stay silent when there's nothing to say — no padding.

# Daily Revenue Brief — <Product> — <YYYY-MM-DD>

**Active objective:** <verbatim from frontmatter `target`, errata-aware>
**Filter today:** <which filter dimensions today's work touches, e.g. "sales · margin">

## Top 3
1. <priority sentence> — [filter:<dim>] — *"<verbatim doctrine citation>"*
2. <priority sentence> — [filter:<dim>] — *"<verbatim doctrine citation>"*
3. <priority sentence> — [filter:<dim>] — *"<verbatim doctrine citation>"*

## Don't do today        ← only when applicable
- <queued item> — violates: *"<verbatim rule citation>"*

## Open question         ← only when a real one exists
- <one risk or unknown to resolve before the day ends>

---
Doctrine: <path>  ·  Last reviewed: <YYYY-MM-DD>  ·  ⚠️ stale (reviewed N days ago) if applicable

Hard rules for the brief

• Each priority MUST have one filter tag and one verbatim citation. If you cannot tag and cite, that item is not a top-3 candidate — pick something else.
• The active objective line is pulled verbatim from target (errata-aware). Do not soften, expand, or restate.
• The footer always shows doctrine path + freshness so the user can audit.
• If last_reviewed is older than review_cadence_days (default 30), append a one-line banner immediately under the title: ⚠️ Doctrine last reviewed N days ago — consider a review. Brief still runs.

Refinement protocol (output-then-refine)

After producing v0, the user may correct one thing ("actually I'm taking the day off", "actually X is happening with deal Y", "actually I have 6 hours not 2"). When that happens:

1. Acknowledge the correction in one line.
2. Regenerate the entire brief with the new context.
3. Do NOT argue or push back on the correction. The user sees their day; you don't.

If the correction makes a brief impossible (e.g. day off), produce a degraded brief: empty top 3, anti-priorities only if relevant, no open question.

Failure modes

Case	Behavior
No doctrine doc found	Hard-fail. Print the template path: <this-skill-dir>/north-star-template.md. Tell the user to copy it, fill it out, and rerun. Do NOT produce a generic brief.
Frontmatter missing or malformed	Same as no doc — hard-fail with template path.
type field is not north-star	Hard-fail. The doc isn't intended for this skill.
Errata block present	Read first; treat as authoritative over body when they conflict. Cite errata explicitly when overriding body.
last_reviewed > 30 days (or > review_cadence_days)	Soft-warning banner. Brief still runs.
Multi-product (multiple north-star docs exist)	Use the active one from context/business/index.md. Override via invocation phrase ("plan my day for X"). Refuse to produce a multi-product brief — wartime focus is doctrine-mandated.
Pre-revenue (no actual revenue yet)	Brief still runs. If a host adapter (e.g. Trillion) injects a revenue number and it's $0, render as Progress: $0 / <target> — pre-revenue mode. Top 3 should bias toward "first dollar" priorities. No degraded mode.
Calendar shows work that violates doctrine	Surface as an anti-priority with explicit rule citation. This is the feature working as intended.
Weekend / holiday	Skill runs. Don't try to detect non-working days — the user knows their context.

Hard-fail message template

When the doctrine doc is missing or invalid, output exactly this (substituting paths):

Can't run the daily revenue brief — no valid north-star doc found.

This skill needs a doctrine doc with frontmatter declaring your active
revenue target, your 90-day filter, and last-reviewed date. Without one,
the brief would be ungrounded productivity advice — which isn't what
this skill is for.

Copy this template, fill it out, save it as ./north-star.md (or wire
context/business/index.md to point at it), then rerun:

  <absolute path to north-star-template.md>

Three minutes of work. Once it's in place this skill will cite it
verbatim every morning.

Do not offer to generate the doc inline. That's a different skill (creating doctrine), not this one (operationalizing it).

What this skill is not

• Not a productivity coach. It cites the user's own doctrine; it does not import frameworks (Hormozi, MicroConf, etc.).
• Not a status report. Status is "what happened"; this is "what should happen."
• Not a strategy generator. If the doctrine is bad, the brief will be bad. The skill is honest about that — it does not paper over weak doctrine with confident-sounding output.
• Not a daily journaling exercise. No mandatory reflection prompts. The output-then-refine loop covers correction; everything else is ritual padding.

For host-agent integrators

This skill is portable: any agent that can read files and follow a contract can run it. Hosts with richer tooling (calendar, email, payments APIs) may enrich the brief without changing its shape — examples:

• Pull today's calendar; surface conflicts as anti-priorities when they violate doctrine.
• Pull one revenue metric; render as Progress: $X / <target> under the active objective.
• Ask one yesterday-check-in question ("Did yesterday's #1 actually happen?") to inform whether to roll forward or reprioritize.

Enrichment is additive. The four-section brief shape, the verbatim-citation rule, and the hard-fail behavior are non-negotiable. Don't replace them with the host's own format.