Your first Routine

A Routine is repeatable work your Talent runs on a schedule, or whenever you ask. This page walks one job all the way from "I do this by hand every week" to "it arrives in team chat before I open my laptop." Give it about fifteen minutes.

1. Pick the right job

Good first Routines share three traits: you already do them by hand, they have the same shape every time, and the output is a summary or a draft rather than an irreversible action. Skip anything that sends email to customers or changes records on the first try.

A worked example

We will use one job throughout: a weekday morning brief that reads your calendar and inbox and posts to your direct-message channel.

2. Connect the tools it needs

Open Connections and connect your calendar, email, and team chat. Your Talent uses your own connected accounts, so it sees exactly what you see and nothing more. If a tool is missing, your Talent will say so rather than invent an answer.

3. Run it once, by hand

Go to Home and ask for it in the composer. Be specific about scope and format:

Summarize my calendar for today and my unread email from the last 18 hours. Group it as: meetings, needs a reply today, and can wait. Keep it under 200 words. Do not send anything.

Read what comes back. This is the step people skip, and it is the step that decides whether the Routine is worth having.

4. Read the receipt

Open Settings, then the Activity tab. Every run leaves exactly one receipt there, and that receipt is the canonical record of what happened: the run, what it did, and what it produced. Admins get a wider view under Usage, which breaks activity down by member and by credits spent.

Check that it actually used the tools you expected. If the brief looks thin, the fix is almost always the instructions, not the model.

5. Tighten the instructions

Rewrite the prompt with whatever went wrong fixed: name the calendar, exclude newsletters, set the word count, say what "urgent" means to you. Run it once more. When you would be happy to receive that output at 8:00 am, you are ready to schedule it.

6. Save it as a Routine

1. Open Routines under Workspace, and select New routine.
2. Name: Morning brief.
3. Category: pick one, or type a new one. Categories group the Routines page.
4. Instructions: paste the prompt you just tightened.
5. When: choose Once, Hourly, Daily, or Weekly. For a weekday brief, pick Weekly and select Monday through Friday.
6. Set the time and confirm the time zone. This is the field people get wrong. Start and end dates are optional.
7. Delivery: keep results in TalentOS, or send them to a connected messaging channel. Pick your direct-message channel.
8. Save.

7. Prove it works before you trust it

On the Routine's card, select Run now. Do not wait until tomorrow morning to find out that a connection was missing. Then open the Routine and check the Schedule panel: next run, time zone, and delivery should all read the way you expect. Routine history holds the previous runs.

You can pause, resume, edit, or delete a Routine at any time from its card or its detail page.

What to check

• The Routine shows "Needs attention". Something it depends on is broken, usually a connection that expired. Open the Routine and check the Connections panel, then reconnect that app.
• Nothing arrived at the scheduled time. Check three things in order: the Routine is not paused, the time zone is yours and not a default, and the Activity tab shows a run at all. No receipt means it never ran. A receipt with a thin result means it ran and the instructions need work.
• It ran but posted nowhere. Check the Delivery line. A Routine with only web delivery leaves its result in Routine history and does not message you.
• It stopped running after working for weeks. Check the workspace credit balance under Settings, then Billing. Admins can see the same thing in more detail under Usage. When the pooled balance is empty, work pauses.
• The output drifted. Instructions are free to edit. Change them, then Run now to confirm before the next scheduled run.