Stricks Learn · one small thing

One Move: Give It a Job That Runs Without You

July 23, 2026 · today's lever: Cowork scheduled tasks

TL;DR Instead of asking for the same daily or weekly thing over and over, set it up once and let it fire on its own cadence. A scheduled task saves your prompt, then spins up a fresh session on whatever schedule you pick — hourly, daily, weekly, weekdays — and it runs even when your computer's asleep, because it isn't running on your computer.

↺ From previous weeks

Skills package a repeating prompt once — write it down, name it, and let Claude reach for it via a trigger description instead of you retyping it. (Turn a repeating prompt into a skill.)

The move

  1. Notice you're repeating a request, not just its instructions: "check X every morning," "summarize Y every Friday" — the timing is part of the ask.
  2. Set up a scheduled task with that same prompt and a cadence: hourly, daily, weekly, or weekdays. It gets the same connected tools and skills a normal session would — nothing extra to configure for that part.
  3. Let it run unattended and review after: each firing is its own fresh session, so it doesn't remember previous runs unless you point it at something that does — a shared doc, a task list, a file it can check.
▶ Try it now — automate something you already ask for on repeat ~cheap 
Set up a scheduled task that [checks something / summarizes
something] every [cadence — e.g. weekday morning at 7am]. Use my
usual connected tools, and have it [tell me / message me / write
to X] when it's done.
Where it breaks — the three edges worth knowing

1. Cloud-only. A task that needs a folder or app on your own computer won't run — scheduled tasks can't be tied to a local folder, only to cloud-connected tools and files.

2. No memory between firings. Each run starts a brand-new session with zero recall of earlier runs. If continuity matters, the task itself has to look somewhere — a doc, a list — rather than assume it remembers.

3. Cadence multiplies cost. A "cheap" one-off ask isn't cheap anymore run daily for a year. Match the schedule to how often you'd actually check in yourself, not to how easy the dropdown makes it to pick "hourly."

Under the hood

What actually runs when a scheduled task fires — for when you want to read the machinery, not just use it.

Open the hood: the trigger, what it spins up, and the primary sources
The lever
Cowork scheduled tasks — a cron-style trigger wrapped around a normal agent session, not a separate automation product.
What it actually calls
Each firing starts an ordinary Cowork session running the prompt you saved, with the same tool, connector, and skill access an interactive session gets. There's no separate "automation-only" API underneath — it's the same agent loop, just started by a timer instead of by you.
The standard underneath
Nothing exotic: standard recurring scheduling (hourly / daily / weekly / weekday cadences), the same shape as any cron job, just pointed at an agent instead of a script.
Primary sources
support.claude.com — scheduling recurring tasks in Cowork · code.claude.com/docs/en/desktop-scheduled-tasks

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