Pick Meetings to Prep

Purpose

Get the list of meetings you want to prep for today and hand each one off to prep-meeting. This skill only collects the list - the actual prep work belongs to prep-meeting.

By default you just name the meetings yourself. The author originally had Claude read the calendar automatically (see "Optional: an automated calendar read" below), then dropped it: it broke when moving from the terminal to the Claude desktop app, and chasing a fix was more effort than saying what's on. Naming two or three meetings takes seconds, and you're the best judge of which ones need prep anyway.

Trigger

/pick-meetings-to-prep, or asking which meetings to prep. Also invoked as a step by /start-the-day.

Process

1. Ask which meetings you want to prep for today. A plain question in chat - reply with names or topics (and times if you like). Don't guess or suggest meetings.
2. If the answer is none, say so and stop.
3. For each meeting named, run the prep-meeting skill. That skill handles finding/creating the meeting note and linking it into today's Daily note - this step is just the loop that invokes it once per named meeting.

Optional: an automated calendar read

If you'd rather Claude read your calendar and offer a multiselect, you can swap step 1 for a calendar read. What the author learned trying this on macOS:

• icalBuddy (brew install ical-buddy) reads events from Calendar.app, including a Google Calendar synced into it: icalBuddy -ic "<calendar name>" -nc -iep "title,datetime" -b "- " -df "" -tf "%H:%M" eventsToday It expands recurring events to today's actual occurrence.
• Plain AppleScript against Calendar.app is unreliable here - it returned a recurring event's original start date rather than today's occurrence, so date filtering silently returned the wrong events.
• macOS grants calendar access per app. icalBuddy worked from Terminal, but from the Claude desktop app it saw no calendars at all ("No calendars"), because the desktop app doesn't request calendar permission and so never appears in System Settings to be granted. If you use the desktop app, expect this route not to work.
• Fetching a Google Calendar secret ICS feed via a web-fetch tool misdated recurring events, because the fetch summarises the feed rather than parsing it. Avoid it for anything date-sensitive.

Whatever method you use, if the read fails, say so rather than silently falling back to asking - make the fallback an explicit choice.

Guardrails

• Never invent meetings or tasks.
• Never create or modify calendar events.