Cron Jobs and Scheduled Tasks

Course: OpenClaw — Autonomous AI Agents | Pathway: Builder | Tier: Free | Level: Beginner Estimated Reading Time: 10 minutes

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This is Where "Autonomous" Gets Real

Up to now, your agent responds when someone talks to it. That is useful, but it is still reactive — it waits for input.

Cron jobs change that. A cron job is a task that runs automatically on a schedule. With cron jobs, your agent can wake up at a set time, do something useful, and go back to sleep. No human needed.

This is the difference between a chatbot and an autonomous agent. A chatbot answers questions. An autonomous agent does work.

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What is a Cron Job?

The name "cron" comes from the Greek word for time — chronos. In computing, a cron job is a task that runs on a schedule. The concept has been around since the 1970s.

A cron schedule is written as a short string of numbers and symbols that tells the system when to run the task. Here are some examples:

The format is: minute hour day-of-month month day-of-week

You do not need to memorise this. There are free online tools like crontab.guru that let you build cron schedules by clicking buttons.

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How Cron Jobs Work in OpenClaw

OpenClaw has a built-in scheduler that reads your cron configuration and triggers agent actions at the specified times.

Each cron job consists of three things:

1. A schedule — when to run (using the cron format above)
2. An agent — which agent should do the work
3. A prompt — what to tell the agent to do

That third part is important. When a cron job fires, OpenClaw sends the agent a message — just like a human would. The agent reads the message, uses its SOUL.md and tools to figure out what to do, and does it.

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Setting Up Your First Cron Job

Open the cron configuration file:

nano ~/openclaw/config/cron.yaml

Add a simple job:

cron_jobs:
  - name: morning-greeting
    schedule: "0 7 * * *"
    agent: helper
    prompt: >
      Good morning. Please send me a brief, friendly message on Telegram
      with today's date and a motivational thought to start the day.
    channel: telegram
    enabled: true

This tells OpenClaw: every morning at 7am, send the Helper agent a prompt, and have it respond on Telegram.

Restart OpenClaw for the change to take effect:

npm start

Tomorrow morning at 7am, your agent will send you a message on Telegram. You did not have to do anything — it just happened.

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Practical Cron Job Ideas

A morning greeting is a nice demo, but the real value comes from practical automation. Here are some examples of what you can do.

Email Summary

  - name: email-summary
    schedule: "0 8 * * 1-5"
    agent: helper
    prompt: >
      Check the email inbox and create a summary of all new emails
      received since yesterday. Categorise them as urgent, follow-up,
      or informational. Send the summary on Telegram.
    channel: telegram
    enabled: true

This requires your agent to have access to an email tool, which is an additional setup step we will not cover in detail here. But the pattern is the same: schedule, agent, prompt.

Social Media Posting

  - name: daily-post
    schedule: "0 10 * * 1-5"
    agent: social
    prompt: >
      Review the content calendar and post today's scheduled content
      to LinkedIn. Follow the brand voice guidelines in your SOUL.md.
    channel: internal
    enabled: true

System Health Check

  - name: health-check
    schedule: "*/30 * * * *"
    agent: monitor
    prompt: >
      Check the status of the following services: website, database,
      API. If anything is down or responding slowly, send an alert
      on Telegram immediately.
    channel: telegram
    enabled: true

Weekly Report

  - name: weekly-report
    schedule: "0 17 * * 5"
    agent: helper
    prompt: >
      Compile a summary of this week's activity. Include any
      significant events, completed tasks, and items that need
      attention next week. Format it as a clear, scannable report
      and send it on Telegram.
    channel: telegram
    enabled: true

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How We Use Cron Jobs at Lalapanzi.ai

At Lalapanzi.ai, we run about 20 cron jobs across our five agents. Here is a sample:

• Atlas runs a daily check on the platform — are all pages loading, are there any errors in the logs, is the database healthy?
• Terrence checks email accounts every 15 minutes and alerts on anything that needs immediate attention.
• Mia posts to social media on a schedule and monitors engagement metrics.
• Rex runs research tasks on topics we are developing course content for.
• Writer drafts content overnight so there is fresh material to review in the morning.

These cron jobs mean that a lot of routine work happens automatically. The team spends less time on busywork and more time on the things that actually need a human brain.

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Getting the Prompt Right

The prompt in your cron job is everything. A vague prompt gets vague results.

Bad prompt:

Check things and let me know.

Good prompt:

Check the inbox at admin@example.co.nz for new emails received
in the last 24 hours. Ignore newsletters and automated notifications.
For each remaining email, provide: sender, subject, and a one-sentence
summary. If any email looks urgent, flag it at the top of the summary.
Send the complete summary as a single Telegram message.

The good prompt tells the agent exactly what to check, what to ignore, what format to use, and where to send the result. There is no room for ambiguity.

Tips for cron prompts:

• Be specific about the task. Do not assume the agent will figure out what you mean.
• Define the output format. Tell it exactly how you want the information presented.
• Specify the channel. Where should the agent send the result?
• Include error handling. What should the agent do if something goes wrong? "If you cannot access the inbox, send a message saying so."

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Timing Considerations

A few things to keep in mind about scheduling:

Time zones. OpenClaw uses your system's local time zone by default. If your computer is set to NZST (New Zealand Standard Time), your cron jobs will run on NZST. Check your system time zone if your jobs seem to fire at the wrong time.

Do not overdo it. Running a cron job every minute creates a lot of work for your machine and your AI model. If you are using a cloud model, it also costs money per call. Start with longer intervals and only increase frequency if you genuinely need it.

Stacking. If a cron job takes longer to run than the interval between runs, you can get jobs stacking up. For example, if a job takes 5 minutes but runs every 2 minutes, you will have multiple instances running at once. Keep your intervals realistic.

Model rate limits. If you are using free models through OpenRouter, be aware that they have rate limits. Too many cron jobs hitting the same model can get you temporarily blocked.

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Enabling and Disabling Jobs

You can disable a cron job without deleting it by setting enabled: false:

  - name: morning-greeting
    schedule: "0 7 * * *"
    agent: helper
    prompt: "Send a morning greeting on Telegram."
    channel: telegram
    enabled: false

This is handy when you are testing or troubleshooting. You can turn jobs on and off without losing the configuration.

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What is Next

Your agent can now respond to messages and run tasks on a schedule. In the next lesson, we will look at running AI models locally on your machine using Ollama — no internet required, no API costs, and your data stays with you.

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Key Takeaways

• Cron jobs are scheduled tasks that make your agent truly autonomous.
• Each cron job has a schedule, an agent, and a prompt.
• Write specific, detailed prompts — vague instructions get vague results.
• Start with longer intervals and increase frequency only when needed.
• You can enable and disable jobs without deleting them.
• Cron jobs are where agents go from "cool demo" to "genuinely useful tool."