Daily Focus skill — intentional manual morning ritual

Every morning the operator opens their agent and runs a single skill: /daily-focus. The skill asks one question — "how do you feel, what's your energy?" — and produces a single "card" file for today: a one-screen prioritised plan that pulls in current tasks from the task tracker, today's calendar, anything missed from yesterday, and any open commitments from the past week's transcripts. Output is a Markdown file named with today's date that doubles as a journal and as the input for any later "what did I commit to today?" agent query.

The critical design choice is that this skill is not automated. It runs only when the operator opens the terminal and types the command. The manual trigger is the ritual.

Replaces the morning standup for solo operators and partially replaces it for small teams. Forces a conscious daily prioritisation pass rather than letting the agent silently degrade the user's attention with auto-generated noise. The deeper insight is operational: when you fully automate a high-stakes ritual, "continuous degradation" kicks in — outputs slowly drift away from what you actually need because no human is in the loop to correct them. Daily Focus is the canonical case for "manual trigger is a feature, not a bug." Founders running this report better attention budget control and meaningful relief from inbox-driven days.

1. Create the skill file under skills/daily-focus/SKILL.md (or your agent's equivalent). Keep it short — a header, the question set, the data sources to pull, and the output shape.
2. Wire the data sources via MCP. Calendar MCP (today's events), task-tracker MCP (Linear / Asana / Jira open tasks), the transcripts folder (yesterday's calls), and the previous day's daily-focus card (so missed items roll forward).
3. Define the output card. Header with date, energy state, top-3 focus, full task list categorised P0/P1/P2, calendar block, "rolled-over from yesterday" section, "long-pending commitments" section. Save under daily-focus/yyyy-mm-dd.md using the naming convention.
4. Add a voice trigger. Wispr Flow + a Raycast snippet → "open terminal at workspace, run /daily-focus."
5. Optional: post to a team chat. A one-line summary card to a team Telegram or Slack channel, so partners see the focus without prying.
6. Hold the line on manual trigger. Resist the urge to cron it. The conscious "I am now opening this" is half the value.
7. Retro weekly. What ended up in P0 but didn't move? What rolled over four days in a row? That signals a skill-extraction candidate (see #127).

Skill body (excerpted, paste into skills/daily-focus/SKILL.md):

---
name: daily-focus
trigger_phrases: ["daily focus", "morning ritual", "/daily-focus"]
---

• Do not cron it. Continuous-degradation drift kicks in within two weeks. The conscious open-terminal-type-command motion is the practice.
• Don't merge it with the team standup. Daily Focus is a personal artefact; the team-side equivalent is a separate retro/sync skill.
• Don't let it grow. If the card runs past one screen, the skill is doing too much. Move side-quests (analytics, deep planning) to their own skills.
• Energy state isn't decoration. Use it: low-energy days produce a 2-item P0, high-energy days an aggressive 5-item P0. Without this lever the skill becomes a glorified task list.
• Naming-convention drift kills retros. All daily-focus files must follow daily-focus/yyyy-mm-dd.md exactly; otherwise the "what rolled over" lookup breaks.

• Lighter: Just a static Markdown template the operator fills by hand each morning, with no agent involvement.
• Heavier: Pair with a weekly-sync skill that aggregates seven daily-focus cards into a Friday retro; surface candidates for new skills (see #127).
• Team-side: Each team-member runs Daily Focus; the one-line top-3 lines get posted to a Telegram thread the founder reads as a daily situational-awareness brief — replaces the all-hands stand-up.