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Routines

A routine is an automation that runs on a schedule and does a job for you, rather than walking contacts through a flow. Where a journey is a canvas of steps that contacts travel through, a routine is a short set of instructions in plain language — "check this week's blog traffic and write up what changed", "pull new leads from the CRM and summarise them" — that the assistant carries out on its own, at the times you pick.

Routines live alongside journeys in the Automations section. Each one has its own page with a description, its instructions, its schedule, and a list of every time it has run.

What you can do here

  • Write the routine's instructions in plain language.
  • Choose how often it runs, and at what time of day.
  • Attach it to a campaign, so what it produces lands there.
  • Run it immediately with Run now, without waiting for the schedule.
  • Pause it, resume it, or archive it when you're done with it.
  • Review each past run in the Runs table — when it ran, whether it succeeded, a summary of what it did, and how many files it produced. Files a routine creates can be @-mentioned in chat like any other saved file (see File artifact).

Setting the schedule

The Schedule row has up to three controls, depending on the cadence you pick:

  • Cadence — how often the routine runs:
    • Manual — never on its own; only when you press Run now.
    • Hourly — at the top of every hour.
    • Daily — once a day, at the time you choose.
    • Weekdays — Monday to Friday, at the time you choose.
    • Weekly — one day a week, at the time you choose.
  • Time of day — the wall-clock time the routine should run.
  • Weekday — for a weekly cadence, which day it runs on.

Which timezone the time means

Next to the time you'll see a timezone name, such as Europe/Berlin or Asia/Jerusalem. That is the zone the time is read in — set a daily routine to 09:00 with Asia/Jerusalem beside it and it runs at 9am in Jerusalem, whatever the server happens to be doing.

When you set or change a schedule, it takes the timezone of the computer you're editing on. So if you're in Berlin, "09:00" means 9am Berlin time. Travelling doesn't move a schedule you already saved — the routine keeps the zone it was saved with until you change the schedule again.

Two things worth knowing:

  • A routine set up before this behaviour existed may show UTC. Those schedules were saved in UTC, so they fire at that time in UTC rather than your local time — which, depending on where you are, can be hours off from what you intended. Changing the schedule (even setting it to the same time again) re-saves it in your own timezone and puts it right.
  • Daylight saving is handled for you. A routine set for 09:00 in a zone that changes clocks still runs at 09:00 local after the change — you don't need to adjust it twice a year.

Example scenarios

Scenario: A Tuesday-morning report

  1. Open the routine and set its Cadence to Weekly.
  2. Set Time of day to 09:00 and the weekday to Tue.
  3. Check the timezone shown next to the time — it should be your own. If it still says UTC and you aren't on UTC, change the time and set it back, which re-saves the schedule in your zone.
  4. Make sure the instructions describe the report you want.
  5. Activate the routine. It will now run each Tuesday at 9am your time.

Scenario: Check a routine actually ran

  1. Open the routine and look at its list of runs.
  2. Each entry shows when the run started and how it finished.
  3. If the last run is at an unexpected hour, check the timezone beside the schedule time — a routine saved in a different zone runs at that zone's 9am, not yours.
  4. Use Run now if you need its output immediately rather than waiting for the next scheduled time.

FAQ

Q: What's the difference between a routine and a journey? A: A journey moves contacts through a series of steps over time. A routine does a job for you on a schedule and isn't tied to any one contact. Both live in the Automations section.

Q: I changed the schedule — will it run on both the old and new times? A: No. Putting a schedule change live replaces the previous schedule entirely; only the new one fires from then on.

Q: Why does my routine run at the wrong time of day? A: Almost always the timezone beside the schedule time isn't the one you expected — most often UTC on an older routine. Re-saving the schedule adopts your own timezone.

Q: Can I run a routine without waiting for its schedule? A: Yes — Run now starts it immediately. It works whether the routine is active or paused, and doesn't affect the next scheduled run.

Q: What happens if I pause a routine? A: It stops running on its schedule until you resume it. Anything it already produced stays where it is.