Lesson 3.2: Scheduled Automation

🎯 What You'll Learn: What scheduled automation is, when you'd want it, and how to describe exactly what you need, so Claude or your IT team can set it up
⏱️ Time Required: 20 minutes

💡 Note on this lesson:

Setting up a schedule involves a small amount of OS-level configuration. You won't do that here. What you will do is design the automation clearly enough that anyone, Claude, a developer, or IT, could set it up from your brief alone.

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The Goal: Automation That Runs Itself

Riley's margin report skill works. But she still has to type a command every Monday morning. Last week she was in a meeting at 8am and the report wasn't ready until 11.

"I want Monday morning to look like this: I make coffee, check my phone, and the report is already there. That's not magic, it's a scheduled task."
— Riley Harper

Scheduled automation means: Claude runs a task automatically at a specific time. No one presses a button. No one has to remember.

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How It Works (Conceptually)

At its core, scheduled automation is simple:

Scheduler fires at the right time
       ↓
Claude runs the task you described
       ↓
Output saved where you specified
       ↓
You get the result (or a notification)

The scheduler handles when. Your skill handles what. Claude handles how.

Your operating system has built-in schedulers. Most corporate environments also have workflow tools (Zapier, Power Automate, Microsoft Teams workflows) that can trigger Claude the same way.

You don't need to know how these work. You need to know what you want and be able to describe it clearly.

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What Makes a Good Scheduling Brief

Three questions to answer before requesting a scheduled automation:

1. What should run?

Which skill or task? The more specific your description, the more reliable the automation.

❌ "Run my report skill"
✅ "Run the /weekly-margin-report skill and save the output as a markdown file named with today's date in ~/reports/"

2. When should it run?

Day, time, frequency. Think about when you need the output to be ready, not just when the task could run.

"Every Monday at 7:30am", ready before your 8am standup
"Every weekday at 6pm", overnight processing, results waiting in the morning
"First working day of the month", monthly reporting

3. Where should the output go?

A specific folder? A file with a predictable name? A Slack message? A notification? If the automation runs while you're not watching, how will you know it worked?

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Business Scenarios

Weekly reports

Riley's margin report runs every Monday at 7:30am. She picks it up with her morning coffee. Her team stops asking "is the report ready yet?"

Daily briefings

A risk exposure summary runs every weekday evening. The operations team arrives each morning with a current snapshot, without anyone spending 30 minutes pulling it together.

Month-end processing

Regulatory submissions, portfolio summaries, invoice processing, anything that currently requires someone to remember to trigger it manually becomes automatic.

Overnight processing

Long-running tasks that would block a working day (large data summarisation, multi-file analysis) run while no one is in the office. Results are waiting in the morning.

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Exercise: Design Your Scheduled Automation

⏱️ Total Time: 20 minutes

No configuration. No code. Just design.

Step 1: Identify what you'd automate (10 min)

Think about tasks you currently trigger manually on a regular basis:

What do I do every week or month because I remember to, not because it needs me specifically?

What report, summary, or check would be more useful if it ran automatically?

What's the cost of someone forgetting to trigger it?

Step 2: Write your scheduling brief (10 min)

Complete this template for at least one automation:

Task:               [What Claude should do — be specific]
Skill or prompt:    [Which skill, or describe the task in plain English]
When:               [Day, time, frequency]
Output:             [File location, folder, notification]
Success indicator:  [How will I know it worked?]

Riley's brief:

Task:               Run the weekly margin report
Skill or prompt:    /weekly-margin-report
When:               Every Monday at 7:30am
Output:             ~/reports/YYYY-MM-DD-margin-report.md
Success indicator:  File exists in ~/reports/ before 8am Monday

Yours:

Task:               _______________
Skill or prompt:    _______________
When:               _______________
Output:             _______________
Success indicator:  _______________

💡 To implement it: Take this brief to Claude Code and say: "I want to schedule this task. Here's the brief: [paste your template]. Can you set up the scheduled task for my operating system and explain how to verify it's working?"

Claude will write the configuration for your specific OS, cron on Mac/Linux, Task Scheduler on Windows. Your brief gives it everything it needs.

✅ Success Criteria:

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What Riley Accomplished

"The first Monday it ran itself, I almost cried. I was in a 7:45am call and at 8:03 I got a message: 'margin report ready.' I hadn't touched my computer. That's the moment this stopped being a course and became part of how I actually work."

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Next Up

Lesson 3.3: Event-Driven Hooks in Practice

Scheduling handles when. Event-driven hooks handle what happens in response to things happening inside a Claude session. You'll see how Riley built an audit log, a validation chain, and a compliance trail, all automatic, all without touching a config file herself.