Skill: Prioritize

The assistant that tells you what to do next and how. It pulls together your open actions, calendar, active projects, and recent signals, then hands back a short, ranked plan: the few things that matter, in order, with a concrete first step for each — and, where useful, a suggested response you can adapt. It recommends; it doesn't act.

When to activate

• "what should I focus on", "prioritize", "plan my day/week", "what's most important", "help me triage", "where do I start", "what's urgent".

Do NOT use prioritize when:

• The user wants a fact from the vault → recall.
• The user wants to weigh one specific decision → challenge-decision.
• The user just wants the raw task list → task-roundup / open TODO.md.

Preflight

1. Read _CLAUDE.md and 00-inbox/MY-PROFILE.md (priorities, critical stakeholders, active projects, tone, working language).
2. Get the real timestamp (today, day of week, time → shapes the plan).
3. Refresh inputs: read TODO.md; if it looks stale, run a quick task-roundup first.

Process

Step 1 — Gather inputs

• TODO.md — overdue, today, upcoming, waiting-on-others.
• Calendar — today's / this week's meetings (time already committed shrinks the plan).
• Active projects — 03-projects/ with status: active, weighted by priority.
• Recent signals — last few daily notes: weak signals, pending follow-ups, commitments.
• Relationships — 02-people/ for stakeholders involved (what works with them, red buttons), and any critically-stale key relationships.

Step 2 — Rank (urgency × importance)

Score each candidate on:

• Urgency — deadline today/overdue, someone blocked on you, a closing window.
• Importance — impact, tied to a high-priority active project, requested by your manager or a critical stakeholder, or a hard-to-reverse / one-way decision.
• Effort & dependencies — quick win vs. deep work; blocked by someone else (→ waiting-on).

Surface the few that matter (3–5), not everything. Ruthless is the point.

Step 3 — Produce the plan

Output a tight, scannable plan:

## Plan — <date>

### 🎯 Top priorities
1. **<action>** — why it's #1 (deadline / impact / who's blocked) — [[source#^t-id]]
   → First step: <one concrete next action>
2. **<action>** — why — [[source#^t-id]]
   → First step: <…>
3. …

### 🗓 Suggested shape for today
- Before your 10:00 meeting: #1 (deep work, ~45 min)
- Between meetings: #3, #4 (quick wins)
- Protect 30 min after lunch for #2

### ✍️ Suggested responses / how to handle
- **<the email/message/ask>** → suggested reply (adapt before sending):
  > <2–4 line draft, grounded in what works with this stakeholder per their people note>
- **<a tricky one>** → talking points: <bullets>; if high-stakes, run challenge-decision first.

### ⏸ Defer / delegate / drop
- <item> — not now because <reason>; revisit <when>.

### ⚠️ Watch
- <stale critical relationship / approaching deadline / decision to challenge>

Rules:

• Explain the "why" for each priority — a ranking without reasons isn't trustworthy.
• One concrete first step per priority (defeat the blank-page problem).
• Suggested responses are drafts, explicitly to adapt — ground them in the relevant 02-people/ note (tone, levers, red buttons). Never send anything; ask before drafting an actual outgoing message if it would be sent on the user's behalf.
• Respect the user's tone from MY-PROFILE.md (direct, no fluff).
• Be honest about trade-offs: saying "drop this" is part of the job.

Step 4 — Persist (optional)

Offer to append the plan to today's daily note under ## Plan (so it's captured and linkable). Don't write unprompted. Don't check off tasks — that's task-roundup.

Step 5 — Handoffs

Point to the right skill when the plan implies one:

• High-stakes decision in the mix → challenge-decision.
• Need a fact to decide → recall.
• A meeting/doc to process first → meeting-ingest / doc-ingest.

Anti-patterns to avoid

❌ Listing everything — prioritization means leaving things out; surface 3–5. ❌ Ranking with no rationale — always say why. ❌ No first step — every priority gets a concrete next action. ❌ Sending on the user's behalf — draft and suggest; never send without explicit go-ahead. ❌ Ignoring the calendar — a plan that doesn't fit the day's meetings is fiction. ❌ Generic advice — ground "how to handle" in the actual people/project notes.

Special cases

Overloaded day (everything is "urgent")

Force-rank to the single most important thing and protect time for it; explicitly park the rest.

Quiet day / ahead of deadlines

Pivot to important-not-urgent: an at-risk project, a stale key relationship, overdue knowledge-build.

Weekly planning

"Plan my week" → use the weekly review + open commitments; output day-level themes rather than hour blocks.

Working language

Write the plan in the vault's working language (MY-PROFILE.md).