Capture action points from Gmail

The problem

Your tasks don't live in your task list. They live in a Gmail thread from Tuesday, a chat message you scrolled past, and a note you wrote to yourself at 23:40. On a busy day you keep asking:

• What did I promise, and to whom?
• Is there a deadline hiding in some thread?
• Who is silently waiting on me right now?
• Did I already forget something today?

Collecting tasks by hand is the first thing that dies on a busy day, and the tasks that hide in messages are exactly the ones you drop. There's a faster way: connect your Gmail once, and every action point lands in one clean list. Ten seconds each morning, and your day is actually planned.

What you get

• A working Gmail connection (MCP): Claude Code reads the messages you allow, right from the chat
• Your capture rules saved in CLAUDE.md: which emails, from whom, and what counts as a task for you
• A working task-capture skill that turns your messages into a clean task list, with replies already drafted for you
• One file where your tasks actually live, in your format, on your machine
• The complete skill file with my real example inside, to compare or just use

Who this is for

• People whose work arrives through email and chat, not through a ticket system
• Project managers and analysts juggling a dozen threads where every third message hides a task
• Anyone with the low-grade anxiety of "I'm sure I promised someone something this week"
• The ones writing notes to themselves at 23:40 and losing them by morning

You need: the free Start Here card completed, your Gmail login, and about 50 minutes. Also works on any text you paste: chats, meeting notes.

About the creator

I'm Anastasia, a business analyst. My tasks used to live in three inboxes and a notebook, and the ones that slipped were always the ones buried in messages. The skill file in this card is my real one, and the run inside it is a real run: five messages in, eight action points out, deadlines and owners included.