Skip to content

Schedule something

You want one thing to happen on a clock: a digest every weekday morning, a reminder this afternoon, a check that runs while you are asleep. You ask for it in the conversation, and the result reaches you where you will see it.

Before you start

Connect a channel first if the answer should come to you: Telegram, WhatsApp, Slack or email takes a few minutes to set up. The web app is not a destination, so a reminder has to leave the browser to be worth having. Without a channel, a task set up inside a chat leaves its answer there, which suits a check you will look up later.

Have your timezone ready. Your installation keeps a clock of its own, and it may not be yours.

Set one up

  1. Say what should happen, when, and where to send it, in one sentence. "Every weekday at eight in the morning, London time, summarise yesterday's orders and send it to me on Telegram." A one-off has the same shape: "Remind me at three this afternoon to call the supplier." Several times belong in one task too: "Mondays at two and four, and Thursdays at one, check the booking inbox" is one task with a rule for each set of days, not three tasks.
  2. Read back what your assistant confirms: the schedule, the timezone and the delivery, before it saves anything. The recipient must be a real address or handle on that channel rather than a name from your contacts.
  3. Open Dashboard > Scheduled (/cron). Your task is in the list, usually under Up next, with its name, its schedule in words and a switch showing it is on.
  4. Check the next run time on the row. If it is not the hour you expected, the timezone is nearly always why.
  5. Press Run now on the row rather than waiting until morning. That proves the whole path, the work and the delivery both.
  6. After its first real fire, open the task for its own page: every past run, whether the work succeeded, and whether the message was delivered. Those are two separate answers, which is how a briefing that ran but never arrived shows itself.

You hear from it on every run, quiet ones included, because silence would otherwise look the same as a dead schedule. Ask for news only if you would rather it stayed quiet. On the form that is the Send when there is nothing to report switch.

From the Scheduled page

Anything you asked for in chat can be changed here afterwards. The list groups tasks as Running now, Needs attention, Up next and Paused, each row with a strip of its recent runs. The switch on a row pauses a task and turns it back on; pausing drops the next run and resuming works out a fresh one, so nothing is caught up in between. Run now fires it immediately, and the row menu holds Run now, Pause or Resume, Edit, Clone, Open and Delete. The Status dropdown narrows the list to active tasks, those needing attention or paused ones, and Sort orders it by next run, last run or name. Paused tasks are folded behind their label at the foot of the list, with a count.

A New job button opens the same settings as a form, though asking for a change is usually faster than hunting for the field. Its schedule has four tabs: Times, Cron, Interval and One-shot. Times is the plain one: each rule has its own weekdays and times, Add time gives a rule another time, Add rule adds days with different times, and one timezone covers them all. Leave the timezone empty and the task runs on your installation's own clock, which the empty field shows.

Clone in the row menu is the quick way to a similar task: it opens the editor on a copy named "Copy of" the original, with the same schedule and timezone, and saving it makes a new task while the original carries on. If you only want other days at other times for the same work, add a rule to the task instead, so its run history and failure notices stay together.

Choosing what should run

Work that produces something, a digest or a report or a price check, runs in a fresh chat every time and remembers nothing from yesterday. Write the instruction so it stands on its own: what to look at, what to do with it, what to send back.

A reminder for yourself is better as a nudge to your main assistant, which already knows your context and picks the note up on its next pass. It costs almost nothing, where a full run costs a little every time, so pick the longest interval that does the job. Daily beats hourly.

If something goes wrong

Nothing arrived. Open the run history. A run that succeeded with its delivery marked as not delivered means the work was done and the message failed: check the channel is still connected and the recipient is an address it can reach. If the run itself is an error, its reason is on the run.

It fired at the wrong time. Give your timezone with the time and ask for it to be set again. A repeating task on the top of the hour is also spread by up to five minutes on purpose, so a few minutes past is not a fault.

It keeps failing. A repeating task never switches itself off: it slows down and carries on spending. You are told in the chat the task belongs to, or in your main chat, at the first failure, the second, the fourth and the eighth, and again when it works. Pause it with the switch while you sort out the cause. Ask for a failure alert on anything you rely on if you want those warnings sent to a particular channel as well.

Where next