Why this skill exists
Ask anyone what they did this week and you’ll get a reconstruction from memory — which means recency bias, forgotten wins, and inflated filler. The evidence of what you actually did is sitting in your sent mail, your calendar, and your file edits. This skill makes Cowork assemble the report from that evidence, and only that evidence.
The design choice that matters: the skill forbids inflation. Every accomplishment must trace to an artifact, and a thin week is allowed to read as a thin week. That sounds like a small thing. It’s the difference between a status report your manager skims and one they trust.
What it does, step by step
- Gathers evidence from the past 7 days — sent emails (what you did, not what you received), meetings with your action items, files you edited, Teams posts.
- Classifies into Shipped / In motion / Blocked / Next week — with rules for each (Shipped requires a delivered artifact; Blocked names the blocker plainly).
- Writes in a fixed format — 15-word bullets, plain verbs, numbers over adjectives, artifacts in parentheses.
- Waits for your corrections, then saves
Status-YYYY-MM-DD.docxto a Status Reports folder — and emails your manager only if you say “send it.”
Install (60 seconds)
- Download the SKILL.md above.
- In OneDrive, create the folder
/Documents/Cowork/skills/weekly-status-report/. - Drop SKILL.md inside. Cowork discovers it automatically at the start of your next conversation.
- Say: “Run my weekly status report.” You’ll see “Weekly Status Report” appear as a chip in Cowork’s side panel when the skill loads.
Make it yours (5 minutes, recommended)
Open the SKILL.md in any text editor and tune three things:
- The format block — paste your team’s actual report template over ours. The skill’s value comes from the procedure, not our formatting taste.
- The delivery step — change the folder path, the file naming, or the manager-email behavior. If your team posts status to a Teams channel instead, say so there.
- The hard rules — add anything your org considers radioactive (client names in internal reports, deal sizes, whatever bit someone last year).
Then schedule it: tell Cowork “Every Friday at 3 PM, run my weekly status report.” Scheduled prompts + this skill = a report that writes itself while you’re in your last meeting of the week. You review, you approve, you leave on time.
Failure modes we’ve already handled
| What goes wrong | How the skill handles it |
|---|---|
| Cowork pads a slow week with fluff | Hard rule: thin week reads thin; no invented filler |
| Accomplishment claimed with no source | Evidence rule: no artifact, no bullet |
| It sends before you’ve reviewed | Delivery is two-stage: draft in chat → save/send only on approval |
| Sensitive topics from your mail leak in | Hard rule excludes personnel/compensation content outright |
The bigger idea
This is the simplest possible demonstration of the skills model: a procedure, written once, executed weekly, by software that reads your work the way you would. Once your team sees one of these run, the “what else could be a skill?” conversation starts itself. That conversation is adoption — see the skill-authoring guide for how to write the next one well.