Scheduled Tasks & Daily Summaries

~14 min · dispatch, schedule, cron, daily-summary

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Recurring work without recurring effort

Dispatch supports scheduled tasks — recurring jobs that fire on a cron-like schedule. Set once, run forever. The natural fit: daily summaries, weekly reports, end-of-month checklists, anything you'd otherwise build a script and a launchd plist for.

Schedule shape: cron expression + task definition + output destination. The task runs against your designated working folder with the same security policy as ad-hoc Dispatch tasks. Output lands wherever the task says — usually a date-stamped file in /output/.

Practical rhythms: daily at 8am for "summarize yesterday's emails / commits / tickets," Friday at 5pm for "weekly progress report," 1st of month for "billing reconciliation." The mobile push notification becomes your reminder that the work is ready, not a request to do it.

Code

Three scheduled tasks worth setting up·json

// Settings → Dispatch → Scheduled Tasks (or via API)

[
  {
    "name": "daily-commit-digest",
    "schedule": "0 8 * * 1-5",   // weekdays 8:00 AM
    "task": "Read git log from yesterday across ~/projects/. Write /Desktop/digests/$(date +%F)-commits.md with one bullet per project.",
    "notify": true
  },
  {
    "name": "weekly-progress",
    "schedule": "0 17 * * 5",    // Fridays 5:00 PM
    "task": "Compile a weekly progress report from /Cowork/working/notes-this-week.md and git logs across ~/projects/. Write /Desktop/weekly/$(date +%F).md.",
    "notify": true
  },
  {
    "name": "monthly-billing",
    "schedule": "0 9 1 * *",     // 1st of month, 9 AM
    "task": "Pull last month's transactions via the finance MCP, categorize, output /Desktop/billing/$(date +%Y-%m).md.",
    "notify": true
  }
]

Cron expression cheat sheet·text

┌──── minute       (0–59)
│ ┌── hour         (0–23)
│ │ ┌── day-of-month (1–31)
│ │ │ ┌── month        (1–12)
│ │ │ │ ┌── day-of-week (0–6, Sun=0)
* * * * *

0  8  *  *  1-5     weekdays at 8:00
0  17 *  *  5       Fridays at 5:00 PM
0  9  1  *  *       1st of month at 9:00 AM
*/15 * * * *        every 15 minutes
0  0  *  *  *       midnight, every day

External links

Exercise

Set up one real scheduled Dispatch task for something you'd normally do manually (a daily summary, a weekly report, an end-of-day review). Make the first run fire 5 minutes from now to verify. Then re-schedule it to its actual cadence.

Progress

Progress is local-only — sign in to sync across devices.

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