0 7 * * 1-5 is what "every weekday at 7" looks like to most of the tools that run jobs on a timer, and it is where the people we build for stop reading. Sean Donahoe, our founder, back in April, on the agents that answer "when do you want it?" with one of those: "The average Joe doesn't know what a cron job is or how to set the formatting."
A routine is the same timer without the formatting: a job a bot does on a schedule, set in words. The Friday update you keep not sending is one. So is the Monday chase that slides to Tuesday.
What it can run
Once at a time you pick, daily on the weekdays you choose, or every so many minutes, anywhere from every 5 to every 1,440. You can hand it to one bot or to a channel goal that a team lead coordinates. The job itself can be anything a bot can do in a conversation: read your calendar, check a web page, go through an inbox, draft a report.
There is no form. You tell your Chief of Staff what you want:
Brief me every weekday at 7 with my calendar and anything urgent.
It proposes a routine with a time and days, and you press Confirm. Until then nothing is scheduled. Sean's description of that step is the shortest one we have: "It tells me what it's gonna do, I say yes or no. And out it goes." Bots propose routines on their own, and they do it often, but switching one on is yours. You should know about every job that runs by itself on your machine.
Each run is recorded as completed, failed or missed, with its result. Every routine gets its own conversation, so all its runs sit together and you can scroll back to last Tuesday's. If a run needs you, it tells you at once and waits. Failures, skipped runs and failure streaks land in a problems list, where you'll see them next time you look. Each routine has its own approval level, or follows its bot's. New bots start on Ask, so anything that needs your say-so arrives as a request: a routine that drafts invoice reminders drafts them and nothing goes out until you approve. Reading your keys always asks. The full picture is in approvals and the stop line.
When the computer is off
The question we get most. Routines run only while your computer is on and Murage is running. Your work stays on your own machine, so the machine has to be on. If the computer was off at 7, a run up to 12 hours late still happens when Murage comes back. After 12 hours the run is marked missed and goes in the problems list.
So if you want a routine to land every morning, leave Murage open on the machine you use, or on one that stays on. A laptop that sleeps overnight and wakes at 8 is fine for a 7am brief. A laptop that stays in a bag until Thursday is not. People ask if that makes routines less useful than a cloud job that runs with nobody at a keyboard. For a brief you read at your desk, no. The brief is for you, and you're at the machine when you read it. For a job that has to happen at 3am on a day you're away, it is a real limit.
Routines and watches
The names sound alike.
A routine runs a job on a timetable. A watch keeps an eye on one file in a bot's folder, up to 1 MB, and tells you what changed. If what you care about is one file, use a watch; if it is a job, a routine.
One more: a ready-made team imported from the team library arrives with its routines switched off. Read what each one does, then turn on the ones you want.
The five we'd set up first
Sean's rule for anything that repeats is the cookie cutter: "I set it up once. Once I've got this, I never have to do it again." These are the five we'd set up on that basis.
- A morning brief at 7, one page with your calendar and anything urgent (morning brief).
- The Friday update, as a weekly report written before anyone asks for it.
- Competitor watch each weekday at 9.
- Monday's invoice chase, with overdue invoices sorted and reminders drafted.
- A support queue sweep, so tickets are sorted before you sit down.
Not all five on day one, though. We'd do the brief first, because by Wednesday you know whether you read it, and only then the next one. Plan on about ten minutes from install to a working team. Download Murage, tell your Chief of Staff the one job you keep forgetting, and press Confirm. The full detail is in routines and webhooks.