Work that runs without you starting it.

The limit, first

Your Mac has to be awake. A scheduled job on a sleeping Mac does not run, it waits.

This is worth designing around rather than discovering. If you rely on something running at 7am, plug the Mac in and set it not to sleep on power. Everything else in this guide assumes you have.

Scheduling a job

Any job can be scheduled. Set it up once with the instruction and settings you want, then give it a time: every weekday morning, every Monday, the first of the month.

Scheduled runs land in Sessions like any other, with the same history and the same audit trail. If one needs an approval it waits for you, exactly as a manual run would.

A scheduled job can start its own box, so a weekly report does not need you to have left anything running.

Triggers

Instead of a time, a job can run when something happens.

• A folder changes. Drop a file in a watched folder and a job takes it. This is the most reliable and most used trigger, and it is the one to reach for first.
• A schedule, as above.
• A repository event, for code work.
• A message arriving, for the services you have connected.

Building one

The automation builder walks you through it as a sentence: when this happens, run that job, with these settings. You see the whole thing in plain words before you turn it on.

Start from a template if one matches. It is faster, and the templates encode choices that are easy to get wrong the first time.

Good candidates

Automations pay off when the trigger is reliable and the output is something you read rather than something that acts.

• A morning brief on what came in overnight.
• A weekly summary of a repository.
• A watched folder that turns dropped documents into structured notes.
• A monitor that tells you when something you care about changed.

Poor candidates

Anything that sends, publishes, or spends without you looking. Not because it cannot, but because the value of automation is removing the boring part, and the interesting part is exactly the part you should keep.

The good pattern is: automate the work, keep the send. Let the job produce a draft on a schedule and tap once to send it.

Turning one off

Automations are listed in one place with a switch. Turning one off leaves everything it produced. If one is misbehaving, switch it off and read its last few runs, which are all on the timeline.