Adopt a Skill someone else wrote

The point of sharing a Skill is that the second person does not start from a blank page. When somebody on your team perfects a method, you adopt it, adjust the parts that are yours, and run it. You never edit their copy.

Shared means read only

A Skill that has been shared with your department or your whole workspace is frozen at the exact version that was approved. You can open it, read the instructions, see its success criteria and the connections it needs, and copy the instruction text. You cannot edit it in place.

That is on purpose. If shared Skills were editable by everyone, nobody could rely on what they were running. The author can set a shared Skill back to private, edit it, and share it again, but while it is private it disappears for everyone else, so this is a deliberate step and not an accident.

Adopt it

1. Open the shared Skill, either from Skills (filter visibility to see what has been shared with you) or from Marketplace.
2. Click the add action on the card or in the detail panel.
3. You now have your own private copy in Skills, with its own identity.
4. Open your copy and edit anything: the instructions, the success criteria, the name.

Your copy is yours. Editing it never touches the original, and the original being updated later never rewrites your copy.

What to change first

Adopted Skills usually need three edits, in this order:

1. The connections it assumes. Read the Skill's connection list. If it expects Notion and your team uses Google Docs, that is an instructions change, not a settings change.
2. The specifics. Board names, channel names, document locations, and audiences are almost always the author's, not yours.
3. The success criteria. They should describe the outcome you will accept, in your workspace's terms.

A worked example

Operations shares a Weekly launch status Skill that reads its planning page and posts to its team channel. Marketing adopts it, swaps in the campaign planning page, changes the audience and channel, then runs the copy once privately. The original stays unchanged, and Marketing now has a version it can schedule.

Then schedule it

Once the copy runs the way you want, click Create routine on its detail page to put it on a cadence and pick where the result lands. See Put a report on a schedule.

Share yours back

When your version is better than what you started with, share it so the next person inherits your improvements instead of repeating your first three runs. Depending on how your workspace is set up, a shared Skill may go through a short review before it appears for everyone, and a Skill waiting on that shows as Needs review.

What to check

• The add action is missing or greyed out. You may already have adopted it. Search Skills for the name before adopting again.
• Your copy fails on the first run. Read its connection list and connect what is missing, then run it once on demand.
• You edited the shared original by mistake. You cannot. If a Skill looks editable, you are looking at your own copy, not the shared source.
• You want the author's later improvements. Adoption is a copy, not a subscription. Adopt again to get a fresh copy of the newer version, and keep or delete the old one.

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