Guide: Scheduled Tasks

Claude Cowork · Feature primer

Overview

A scheduled task is a piece of work you set up once to run automatically — on a repeating rhythm or at a single future time. Every morning at six, each Monday before your week starts, an hour from now: you describe the work and the schedule, and Claude runs it on its own and leaves you the result.

The point is to stop being the trigger. The recurring report, the daily briefing, the weekly digest — these don’t need you to remember to start them. They need to be set up well once.

What You Can Schedule

• A recurring rhythm. “Every weekday at 7am, give me a briefing of overnight emails and today’s meetings.” “Each Friday, summarize the week’s sales activity.” These run indefinitely until you change or stop them.
• A one-time future run. “Tomorrow at 3pm, remind me to send the proposal.” “In an hour, check whether the deploy finished.” These fire once and are done.

The tell for scheduling is a phrase about timing or repetition — every morning, each Monday, daily, in an hour, tomorrow at. If doing it once right now wouldn’t satisfy the request, it probably wants a schedule.

How It Works

You set up the task in plain language: what to do, and when. Claude stores both. When the time comes, it runs the task with the instructions you gave — pulling from your connectors if the work needs live data, producing the output, and delivering it where you asked.

Because a scheduled task often runs while you’re not watching, two things make it reliable:

• It needs its own context. A task that runs Monday morning can’t ask you a clarifying question first. Spell out what “the weekly summary” means — which sources, what format, who it’s for — when you set it up.
• It leans on connectors. A briefing of “today’s meetings” needs your calendar connected; a sales digest needs your CRM. See the Connectors guide. Set those up before the task runs for the first time.

Changing or Stopping a Task

A schedule isn’t permanent. You can change the time, rewrite what the task does, or stop it entirely. If a daily briefing is firing too early or covering the wrong things, adjust it — the same way you’d reschedule a standing meeting.

When to Reach for a Scheduled Task

• You run the same thing on a rhythm — a morning brief, a weekly report, a month-end check.
• A result is only useful if it’s reliably there, not dependent on you remembering.
• You want a future nudge or a check that happens once at a set time.

If it’s a one-off you want now, just ask for it now. If it’s a habit, set it up once and let the schedule carry it. Many of the more hands-off recipes in this library end with exactly this move: prove the task by hand, then schedule it so it runs without you.