microsoft-todo skill for Claude Code

A Claude Code skill for managing Microsoft To-Do tasks and lists via the microsoft-todo-cli command-line tool.

Once installed, Claude understands natural language task management requests and translates them into the right todo commands — without you needing to remember syntax.

Examples of what you can say:

• "Remind me to submit the expense report by Friday at 2pm, mark it important"
• "Show me what's overdue and what's due today across all my lists"
• "Create a task for the team offsite with steps: book venue, send invites, prepare agenda"
• "Mark the dentist appointment as done"
• "Set up a weekly recurring task for team standup every Monday"

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Prerequisites

1. microsoft-todo-cli installed and authenticated:

   pip install microsoft-todo-cli
   todo lists   # should return your lists without error

2. Claude Code installed.

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Installation

Clone this repo and copy the skill folder to your Claude skills directory:

macOS / Linux:

git clone https://github.com/dalager/microsoft-todo-skill
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills/microsoft-todo
cp -r microsoft-todo-skill/* ~/.claude/skills/microsoft-todo/

Windows (PowerShell):

git clone https://github.com/dalager/microsoft-todo-skill
New-Item -ItemType Directory -Force "$env:USERPROFILE\.claude\skills\microsoft-todo"
Copy-Item -Recurse microsoft-todo-skill\* "$env:USERPROFILE\.claude\skills\microsoft-todo\"

Restart Claude Code — the skill will be available automatically.

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Usage

Just describe what you want to do. Claude will figure out the right commands.

Creating tasks

Add a task to call the dentist tomorrow morning

Create a task "Q2 planning" in my Work list with steps: define goals, assign owners, set timeline

Remind me to submit the expense report by Friday at 2pm, make it important

Viewing tasks

What's overdue and what's due today?

Show me all my important tasks

What's in my Shopping list?

Completing and updating

Mark "Call dentist" as done

Move the report deadline to next Monday

Add a note to "Q2 planning": approved budget is $50k

Recurring tasks

Set up a weekly reminder for team standup every Monday at 9am

Create a daily task to check emails, recurring on weekdays

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Known quirks

Reminders with a specific date and time

The CLI's help text doesn't document this, but to set a reminder to a specific date and time, use MM/DD HH:MM am/pm format:

-r "03/27 2:00 pm"   ✓  March 27 at 2pm
-r "friday 14:00"    ✗  does not work
-r "2026-03-27 14:00" ✗  does not work

The skill documents this correctly so Claude will use the right format automatically.

Windows terminal encoding

On Windows, todo lists may throw a codec error if any list name contains an emoji. The skill works around this by using todo lists --json instead.

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File structure

SKILL.md                  # Main skill instructions (loaded by Claude Code)
references/
  commands.md             # Full command reference for all 40+ commands
evals/
  evals.json              # Test cases used during development

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Development

This skill was built and evaluated using the skill-creator workflow. Two iterations were run against a live Microsoft To-Do account.

Iteration 1 results: with-skill 93% vs baseline 100% (failing assertion: reminder format) Iteration 2 results: with-skill 100% vs baseline 100% — with-skill 3–5x faster on structured tasks

To run the evals yourself, you need the skill-creator plugin and a configured microsoft-todo-cli instance.