Skills, Schedules, and Automation
80 minutes
Module 12 · Tier III
Skills & Schedules
Encode your best practices. Automate your routines.
Charter Oak Strategic Partners
A Skill is a procedure
Claude follows automatically.
Claude reads the Skill metadata to decide when to activate.
It loads the full instructions only when the task is relevant.
The result: consistent output without repeating yourself.
Three types of Skills.
Anthropic
Built-in. Excel, Word, PowerPoint, PDF document creation. Available to everyone. Claude uses them automatically.
Custom
Built by you. Brand guidelines, reporting templates, compliance checks, analytical frameworks. Your procedures, encoded.
Partner
From the Skills Directory. Notion, Figma, Atlassian, financial services. Professionally built, ready to install.
What a Skill looks like.
---
name: weekly-sales-report
description: Generates a formatted weekly sales summary
from CRM export data. Use when processing
sales CSVs or creating revenue reports.
---
# Instructions
1. Read the CSV from the current folder
2. Calculate: total revenue, deals closed, win rate
3. Compare to last week's numbers
4. Format as markdown report
5. Save as weekly-sales-report.md
Three ways to build a Skill.
Ask Claude
Open a chat. Describe what you want the Skill to do. Claude drafts the SKILL.md, asks clarifying questions, and refines it. No file system knowledge required.
Works for most business users.Upload a ZIP
Package SKILL.md with reference files and scripts in a folder. Compress it. Go to Settings → Customize → Skills → Add custom skill. Upload the ZIP.
For Skills that need supplementary files.Org-wide provisioning
Team and Enterprise Owners upload Skills in the admin panel. Every team member gets it automatically. Enabled or disabled by default. No individual setup.
One Skill. Entire department.Skills vs. Projects vs. Instructions
Your preferences. Always on. How Claude communicates with you.
Your filing cabinets. Loaded when you enter the project. Static context.
Your procedures. Activate dynamically when the task matches. Work everywhere.
One Skill.
Entire team.
On Team and Enterprise plans, Owners provision Skills for every user. Brand guidelines, compliance checks, reporting templates — deployed once, followed by all.
Open standard. Portable investment.
The Skill specification is published at agentskills.io. Skills you build for Claude work across any AI platform that adopts the standard.
Your investment in Skills is not locked to one vendor.
Schedule it.
Six cron patterns cover 90% of business scheduling.
0 9 * * 1-5 Every weekday at 9 AM
0 8 * * 1 Every Monday at 8 AM
0 17 * * 5 Every Friday at 5 PM
0 9 1 * * First of every month at 9 AM
0 */4 * * 1-5 Every 4 hours on weekdays
30 8 * * 1 Every Monday at 8:30 AM
No need to memorize. Ask Claude to write the expression.
Build a Skill. Write the schedule. Calculate the ROI.
Build the Skill
15 min
Write the cron
5 min
Calculate ROI
5 min
Present
5 min
Pick a recurring task you do every week. Encode it as a Skill. Schedule it. Calculate how many hours you save per year.
Add it up.
Fifteen people. One Skill each. Two hours saved per week.
1,560 hours/year
Hours returned to the work that requires your expertise, your judgment, your relationships.
Before you install a Skill.
Read it first
Skills include instructions and may include executable scripts. Read the SKILL.md before installing.
Third-party caution
Partner Skills are reviewed. Custom Skills from unknown sources should be treated like untrusted code.
Code execution
Skills with scripts require code execution enabled in Settings. Admins control this on Team/Enterprise.
MCP awareness
Skills referencing external services may use MCP connectors. Understand what data leaves your machine.
Skills encode your procedures.
The API scales them.
Module 13: When Claude stops being a tool you open and starts being infrastructure your business runs on.