A routine is a job your AI does for you on a schedule, without you asking for it.
It runs in the cloud. Your laptop can be shut and your phone can be in your pocket. The finished result is sitting there waiting when you next open the app.
That is the whole idea. The jobs you keep meaning to do, and keep not doing, stop depending on you remembering.
The tedious ones. The morning read of the inbox. The Friday filing. The monthly numbers.
They are not for the thinking. A routine works when the job is always the same shape and only the details change.
About two minutes, and you only do it once.
Set the time in your own local time, not the browser's. If you open the shop at 7:30, a 7:00 brief means you read it over your first coffee instead of between customers.
When: weekdays, 7:00am
Why: you start the day knowing what matters instead of digging for it.
The prompt to schedule:
Use my With Voss vault connector. Check the vault for what changed in the
last day, and check my connected mailboxes for new email. Give me a short
morning brief: 1) emails that need me today, with a draft reply where the
answer is obvious, 2) what changed in the vault, 3) today's arrivals or
bookings if my vault has booking tools, 4) one thing I should not forget
today. Keep it under 200 words. Drafts only, never send anything.When: Fridays, 4:00pm
Why: the week's knowledge goes into the vault instead of leaving with the weekend.
The prompt to schedule:
Use my With Voss vault connector. Help me close the week. Ask me what
happened this week that the business should remember: new prices, supplier
changes, decisions, things that went well or badly. File what I tell you
into the right vault notes, write a short journal entry for the week, then
finish with what is coming next week.Start with those two only.
Somebody who wakes up to six automated reports stops reading all of them by the second week. Two is a habit. Six is noise you learn to swipe away.
Give the first two a month. When you notice you are reading them properly and acting on them, add a third.
When: Monday to Friday, 1:00pm. Optional.
Why: it catches the morning's email while there is still time to do something about it. Skip it if the morning brief is enough on its own.
The prompt to schedule:
Use my With Voss vault connector. Check my connected mailboxes for email
that arrived this morning. Summarise what matters in a few lines, and
prepare draft replies for anything routine, using the voice notes in my
vault. Drafts only. Flag anything urgent at the top.When: the 1st of the month, 8:00am. Needs a connected platform such as Xero, Shopify or Hospitable.
Why: five plain lines on how the month went, filed where next year's you can find it.
The prompt to schedule:
Use my With Voss vault connector. Pull last month's numbers from my
connected platforms (sales, bookings, invoices due, whichever my vault
has). Compare them with the month before. Give me five plain lines, then
file a copy into reference/monthly-numbers.md.Scheduled routines that can actually reach your vault are a Claude feature today.
ChatGPT has scheduled tasks, but they cannot reliably use connectors, so the task runs without your business memory and gives you a generic answer. Grok has no scheduler at all.
On those apps you run the same routines by hand. Open a chat and say "morning brief" or "wrap it up". Your vault teaches every connected AI what those phrases mean, so you get the same job done, you just start it yourself.
It takes ten seconds and it is worth doing. The routine is the habit, not the timer.