Scheduled Tasks: Proactive Claude
The shift from reactive to proactive: work that happens without you starting it. Describe a task, set a cadence, and Claude runs it — a morning brief, a weekly report, recurring research.
Reactive
You open Claude and ask. Nothing happens until you start it. The weekly report still waits for you to build it by hand.
Proactive
Each run is a fresh session. Monday at 8am, the report draft is already waiting in your inbox for a quick review. Work happens while you sleep.
Interactive: build a recurring task
Compose a scheduled task and watch the plain-English summary build. Notice the default is always a draft — you earn full autonomy run by run.
1 · What should Claude do?
2 · How often?
3 · Output
Your scheduled task
The key limit (be honest)
Cowork scheduled tasks only run while the computer is awake and the desktop app is open. Missed runs catch up on next wake. (Claude Code has cloud options that run with the laptop closed — it exists; we don't teach it here.)
The safe-use rule
Keep outputs as drafts for anything high-stakes, watch the first few runs, and reserve fully autonomous runs for low-stakes, reversible tasks. Earn autonomy run by run — exactly like a new hire.
Key takeaway
Scheduled tasks make Claude proactive. Start them as drafts, watch a few runs, then trust the low-stakes ones to run themselves. Next: Module 4 wires all of this into your apps.