Your first weekly task for Claude Code

Pick the task: it asks, you answer

Most people open Claude Code and ask "what can you do?". That is the wrong question. The right one is what repeats in your week. Do not try to answer it alone. Open a new session, paste this, and answer its questions:

I want to hand Claude Code one task that I repeat every week. Ask me one question at a time about my normal week, until you can suggest three tasks that fit. For each task, write how long it takes me today, what goes in, what comes out, and why it is a good place to start. Do not create or change any files at this stage.

What I got

In a demo folder I answered as the owner of a café with 8 employees. It asked four questions, one at a time: what repeats every week, how long each thing takes, where the material comes from, and where the result goes. Then it suggested three tasks, in the order to start with them:

• •Weekly till report (40 minutes): the input is the Excel file the till exports, and the result is easy to check.
• •Replies to Google reviews (half an hour): it drafts, you publish.
• •Shift schedule (two and a half hours): the most time, but the rules have to be written first.

It left supplier orders out, and it was right: the stock count is done on paper, so there is nothing for it to read. It ended with "I did not create or change any file".

Of the three, take the one that passes the four signs in part 2. For the rest of this guide I took the shift schedule, because it is the task of the client from the video, and once the rules are written it passes all four.

Now write down the number. How long did the task you picked take you last week? That is your before number. Without it you will not know if anything changed.

Four signs a task is right for a first try

Before you go on, check the list. A good first task meets all four:

• •It repeats every week with the same steps. If it looks different every week, there is nothing to teach it.
• •The input is already in a file. A form export, an Excel file, a folder. A sheet of paper or voice notes, not yet.
• •You can check the result by eye in a few minutes. You know right away whether the schedule makes sense or the total is right.
• •It prepares, you send. At the start it does not send messages in your name or move money. It writes a file, and you decide what goes out.

Write it: what goes in, what comes out, the rules

This is the part my client was afraid of. He was sure he was not technical enough. It is four lines to fill in, in plain language with no code, and a last line you copy as it is:

The task: [what the task is], every [which day].
What goes in: [which file or export, and where it is].
What comes out: [what you want at the end, and in which file].
The rules: [what must happen, what must not, what comes first].
Before you start, ask me questions until you can write a plan, and start only after I approve it.

The last line is the important one. Without it, it starts building on a guess. With it, it asks first and builds only after you approve.

A full example: the shift schedule

This example comes from a demo folder, with an availability file for 8 made-up employees. It is not my client's business. It shows what a filled template looks like:

The task: next week's shift schedule, every Friday.
What goes in: the file availability.csv in this folder. It is the export of the availability form: one row per employee and per shift they can work.
What comes out: a file schedule.csv, Sunday to Friday, morning and evening, with the employees' names in each shift. Below it, a list of shifts you could not staff.
The rules: two employees in every shift. An employee is only placed in a shift they marked. No employee works more than 4 shifts a week. No employee works an evening and then the next morning.
Before you start, ask me questions until you can write a plan, and start only after I approve it.

What I got

Before it wrote anything, it read the availability and found on its own that Wednesday evening was tight: only two employees had marked it. Then it asked six questions I had not thought of, such as whether one employee may take the morning and the evening of the same day, and how to choose between several schedules that all keep the rules.

I answered, it wrote a plan, and I typed "approved". The result: all 12 shifts staffed with two employees, and every employee got between 2 and 4 shifts. It said it had checked every rule. I did not take its word for it, and checked with a separate script of my own: 0 violations.

Save it as a skill, so next week is one word

At the end of the first run it wrote that its scripts were in a temporary folder, with this week's dates fixed inside them. Next week you would start from zero. So, in the same session, ask it to save the work as a skill. A skill is a folder with an instruction file that Claude Code runs when you type its name:

Save what we just did as a skill named [a short English name, for example friday-schedule] in the project folder .claude/skills. Keep the scripts inside the skill folder, and work out again on every run whatever changes from week to week, like dates, with no fixed values in the code.

In the example I named the skill friday-schedule. It created .claude/skills/friday-schedule/SKILL.md, with the scripts and a test for the dates next to it. Next Friday, open a new session from the project folder and type / and the skill name:

/friday-schedule

What I got: in a new session, with no explanation, it produced the exact same schedule, check included, in 55 seconds.

How you know it worked, and what to do when it did not

• •The pick: you have one task, with its minutes from last week.
• •The writing: it asked questions and changed no files until you typed "approved".
• •The result: you checked it against what you did by hand last week, and it keeps your rules.
• •The skill: in a new session, the skill name runs the task with no further explanation.

Did not work? In this order:

1. It started building without asking. Press Esc to stop it, and paste the template again with the last line.
2. The result breaks a rule. Write the rule in one sentence, and ask it to add the rule to the check and to the skill. That way it will not repeat it next week.
3. It does not know /friday-schedule. Open a new session from the project folder, and check that the file is at .claude/skills/friday-schedule/SKILL.md.

Sources

• •Skills, where they are saved and how to run them with /: code.claude.com/docs/en/skills
• •Asking it to ask questions and write a plan before it builds: code.claude.com/docs/en/best-practices
• •The client's story comes from a testimonial he recorded. No name and no details of his business.
• •The examples are real Claude Code output from clean demo folders, with made-up data, on November 14, 2026. The demo sessions ran in Hebrew; the English here describes them.