A daily kickoff workflow that turns yesterday’s plans, goals, and notes into a focused plan for today.

Use it to choose the day’s main outcomes, plan the first focus block, and prepare a short start-of-day note.

It helps you start with clear priorities and surface blockers before spending time on deep work.

start-day — Skill for Claude Code and Codex by tomzx

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent

npx skills add tomzx/agents --skill start-day

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/tomzx/agents

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tomzx/agents/start-day/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/tomzx/agents/start-day)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tomzx/agents/start-day"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tomzx/agents/start-day/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tomzx/agents/start-day"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tomzx/agents/start-day.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 48 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 825 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.

Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.

Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00048	$0.00825
Opus 5	$0.00024	$0.00413
Sonnet 5	$0.00010	$0.00165
Haiku 4.5	$0.00005	$0.00082

Measured 7d ago against content hash 00baab4018ac, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

start-day scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 7d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/start-day/SKILL.md · 90 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 90 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

BASE_DIR=!~/.agents/scripts/get-env NOTES_DIR TODAY=!date +%Y-%m-%d YEAR=!date +%Y MONTH=!date +%m DAY=!date +%d

Start Day

Frames the day before deep work: confirm priorities, first focus block, and blockers to surface early.

Prerequisites

NOTES_DIR set (via ~/.agents/scripts/get-env NOTES_DIR)
Optional: {BASE_DIR}/goals.md, {BASE_DIR}/team-goals.md
Optional: {BASE_DIR}/{YEAR}/{MONTH}/{TODAY}.standup.md (from end-of-day-summary, written as "next workday" standup)
Optional: SEND_DAILY_SLACK set (via ~/.agents/scripts/get-env SEND_DAILY_SLACK; truthy values 1, true, yes enable Slack posting)

Steps

1. Gather context

Read if they exist:

{BASE_DIR}/{YEAR}/{MONTH}/{TODAY}.standup.md (today's planned bullets from yesterday's EOD)
{BASE_DIR}/goals.md and {BASE_DIR}/team-goals.md
{BASE_DIR}/{YEAR}/{MONTH}/ for yesterday's *.overall.md (same month folder; use calendar yesterday date) when you need continuity

2. Synthesize (in chat unless the user asks for a file)

Produce a short brief:

Top 3 outcomes for today (from standup + goals; resolve conflicts explicitly)
First 60 to 90 minutes (single concrete focus, no meeting multitasking)
Blockers or asks to send before others go heads-down
One thing to protect or decline if the day looks overloaded

If standup is missing, derive top 3 from goals and anything the user says is urgent.

3. Optional file output

If the user wants it persisted, write {BASE_DIR}/{YEAR}/{MONTH}/{TODAY}.start.md:

---
date: {TODAY}
---

# Start of day

## Top 3 outcomes
## First focus (60 to 90 min)
## Blockers or asks (early)
## Notes

Relationship to other skills

end-of-day-summary writes {TODAY}.standup.md the prior evening (as the next workday file). Start-day consumes that file when present.
Do not duplicate the GitHub or Slack pipelines from end-of-day-summary here.

Post update to Slack

As the final step, check whether SEND_DAILY_SLACK is set (via ~/.agents/scripts/get-env SEND_DAILY_SLACK). Only post when it resolves to a truthy value (1, true, yes). If unset or empty, skip this step and inform the user that the Slack update was skipped.

Read the full file on GitHub · 90 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

7d ago First seen · 90 lines · 48 tokens per session scan A 00baab4018ac

Subscribe to this mod's changes

start-day is a skill published in the GitHub repository tomzx/agents (6 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 48 tokens to every session and 825 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.

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start-day