Cron Mastery

Cron Mastery

Schedule automated tasks, reminders, and periodic workflows using OpenClaw's cron system.

Quick Reference

Schedule Types

Common Patterns

# Daily at 9am
cron: "0 9 * * *"

# Every hour
everyMs: 3600000

# Monday at 8am
cron: "0 8 * * 1"

# Every 30 minutes during business hours
cron: "*/30 9-17 * * 1-5"

Use Cases

1. Daily Morning Brief

{
  "name": "morning-brief",
  "schedule": {"kind": "cron", "expr": "0 8 * * *", "tz": "Europe/Berlin"},
  "payload": {"kind": "agentTurn", "message": "Generate morning brief: check emails, calendar, priorities"},
  "sessionTarget": "isolated"
}

2. Periodic Health Checks

{
  "name": "health-check",
  "schedule": {"kind": "every", "everyMs": 3600000},
  "payload": {"kind": "systemEvent", "text": "Heartbeat: check system status"},
  "sessionTarget": "main"
}

3. Reminder

{
  "name": "meeting-reminder",
  "schedule": {"kind": "at", "at": "2026-02-20T14:30:00Z"},
  "payload": {"kind": "systemEvent", "text": "Reminder: Meeting in 30 minutes"},
  "sessionTarget": "main"
}

Job Management

Best Practices

1. Use isolated sessions for agentTurn jobs (clean context)
2. Set notify=true for user-facing reminders
3. Use descriptive names for easy identification
4. Test before scheduling — use run(action="run") first
5. Review runs periodically — check for failures

Heartbeat vs Cron

Example: Self-Improving Agent Schedule

{
  "name": "weekly-learning-review",
  "schedule": {"kind": "cron", "expr": "0 10 * * 0", "tz": "Europe/Berlin"},
  "payload": {
    "kind": "agentTurn",
    "message": "Review self-improving-agent learnings. Consolidate to MEMORY.md. Report insights."
  },
  "sessionTarget": "isolated",
  "notify": true
}