Automate More Work with Scheduled AI Tasks

How do you put your AI to work on its own?

Picture logging in on a Monday morning to find your weekly brief ready and waiting. Or a detailed report on your three strongest market competitors.

If you’re still getting comfortable with AI, automating work might sound like magic to you. Many folks default to using AI to answer a few questions, maybe to rewrite a couple of paragraphs here and there.

But you can squeeze a lot more value out of your subscription when you start effectively delegating real projects for your AI to complete in the background.

Not busywork that doesn’t move the needle -- but automating real work that saves you time or makes your day easier, without requiring you to babysit the process.

We can do that (very easily!) with Scheduled Tasks.

So today, I want to break down:

• How to get your AI to start working on tasks without you

• How to schedule your most useful prompts to be completed automatically

• What you unlock by treating AI as a teammate (instead of a tool)

—@dharmesh

What Automating with AI Looks Like

Automating more work with AI starts with delegating more work.

If you’re only using AI for the quick stuff, like asking a Google-able question or requesting a short paragraph rewrite, your working relationship will remain synchronous.

To get more out of AI, we need to mix in asynchronous work. Work that gets done while you’re doing other things, like laughing at my dad joke generator or sleeping.

Instead of a prompt that looks like this: “What are the top 10 companies in enterprise CRM tools?”

We can add some weight to it, so it looks like this: “Research the top 10 companies in enterprise CRM tools and pull each one's website URL, pricing, and brand positioning angles they’re using on their website.”

In the first prompt, we’re outsourcing a single-step task. In the second prompt, we’re outsourcing a multi-step task. By treating AI like a teammate capable of handling multi-step tasks, we create more opportunities to let it work on autopilot while we focus on other things.

Once you’ve tested the prompt and you’re happy with the output, you can set it to repeat on a schedule. Let’s get into that now.

Schedule the Work That Matters

Scheduling is the simplest first step to put AI to work without your constant supervision. When you find a prompt that really helps you, schedule it.

Worth knowing up front: scheduled tasks are a paid feature on both OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude. There are few better investments in your AI education than one of these subscriptions (either is fine), which will set you back about $20 per month.

Setting up your first scheduled task is relatively beginner friendly:

• ChatGPT:

  • Click “Scheduled” in the sidebar

  • Tell ChatGPT, in plain language, what to do and how often, and it will take care of everything else

• Claude:

  • Click “Scheduled” in the sidebar

  • Click “New Task” → Create with Claude

  • From there, Claude will guide you through creating a scheduled task.

(Quick aside: the interfaces in these apps are always changing -- I just checked these steps myself, but if you get lost, just ask your AI of choice for help!)

I'll start by taking the research task example introduced in the previous section and turning it into a recurring scheduled task:

You can (and should) edit the prompt to fit your exact needs. Don’t worry about breaking anything: the worst thing that can happen is that the output doesn’t fully match what you’re looking for -- in which case you just edit the prompt and try again.

You can really let your imagination run wild when it comes to scheduling tasks. If you use Connectors (Claude) or Apps (ChatGPT) to connect your AI to other apps, the number of useful scheduled tasks available to you rises dramatically.

If you have your favorite AI connected to your personal email inbox:

And a final idea to help with water cooler conversations:

Scheduled Tasks alone can turn your AI usage from “question in, answer out” to a more personalized AI assistant who is always working for you. Try it!

From Tool to Teammate

Once you have a couple of scheduled tasks running on their own and reliably making your workflows run a little smoother, you naturally start finding more opportunities to delegate more work to AI.

Moving from using AI like a tool to using it like a teammate is a big deal. It’s about reallocating a healthy chunk of your time away from rote keystroke work and towards making the bigger picture decisions that require taste and judgment.

If you’ve read this far, try to create at least one simple scheduled task today. It doesn’t matter how small the task is. Scheduling any task at all helps build the habit and puts you on the right track.

I’d love to know what you’re going to schedule. Hit reply and tell me what your first or favorite scheduled task is. I read every response (and respond to a few) and I’m looking forward to hearing what you came up with 🙂

—Dharmesh (@dharmesh)