Stop remembering to use AI. Make it show up.
The hard part was never the prompting. It is that you have to remember to go and do it, on a Tuesday, when four other things are on fire.
A scheduled task fixes that. You write the instructions once, it runs on a cadence you pick, and the work is sitting there waiting for you. Both Claude and ChatGPT do this now. Neither of them did a year ago.
You stop opening AI to start work. You open it to review work that is already done.
How to do it in Claude
It lives in Cowork, and in the newer merged experience rolling out to Pro and Max. Any paid plan. There is no free tier.
The fast way, and the one worth learning. Do the job once by hand. Get the
output right. Then type /schedule and Claude turns that exact process into a
recurring task. You are not writing instructions into the dark and hoping. You are pointing at
something that already worked and saying "again, every Monday."
The manual way. Click Scheduled in the left sidebar, then New task, then either Set up manually or Create with Claude and let it interview you. Fill in the name, the prompt, the approval mode and the frequency. Hourly, daily, weekly, weekdays, or manual only.
Cloud routines run on their own, on their cadence, whether or not your laptop is open. But if you point a task at a folder on your own machine, it needs the desktop app running to reach those files. Decide which kind you are building before you write it.
How to do it in ChatGPT
Every plan including free, with real limits on free.
The fast way. Ask for something that implies a time. "Let me know when my package is delivered." Or finish a piece of work you like and click the clock icon to repeat it daily, weekly or monthly.
Where they live. Go to Scheduled to create and manage them, or open chatgpt.com/schedules directly. Turn notifications on under Settings, then Notifications, or you will miss everything.
Triggered by events, not just the clock. On Plus and above, a task can watch Gmail, Slack or GitHub and fire when something happens rather than at a set time. That is the thing Claude does not currently do.
The limits, honestly. Three active tasks on Free and Go, five on Plus, ten on Business and Edu, fifteen on Pro and Enterprise. On free you get one run a day at most and you cannot pick an exact time, only a window like morning or afternoon.
Which one for which job
Both will run a prompt on a timer. They are genuinely different past that.
- When the job touches your actual files, folders and connected tools.
- When the routine is complicated, because you can prove it once and then schedule it.
- When it is a watch rather than a routine, firing on an email or a message.
- When the cadence is odd, like the first business day of the month.
- When you are on a free plan, because it is the only one of the two that does this at all.
Never schedule a send. Draft, yes. Send, no.
The guide has five routines you can copy straight in, and the four rules that stop a routine quietly going wrong every week for a month.Three more free tools
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