Until now, Langdock always ran on demand. You open a chat, ask a question, get an answer. That works well, but there is a catch: nothing happens unless you start it yourself. The same routine tasks every morning, gathering context before a meeting, the quick weekly recap on Friday, all of that you have to trigger over and over.

Scheduled tasks turn that around. You define once what should happen and when, and Langdock takes care of it on its own from then on, every day, every Monday, or on the days you choose. The work is already done by the time you sit down at your desk.

In this newsletter, we build such a task end to end, using an example that is useful for almost anyone: a meeting briefing that writes itself every afternoon.

Automation is nothing new in Langdock. Until now, it ran through Workflows, a powerful product that lets you assemble processes from individual building blocks: a trigger, then conditions, AI analyses, and actions, step by step. That is strong, but it had three hurdles in practice.

• An admin has to enable Workflows in the workspace first.
• You have to understand the building-block system to build anything useful.
• The AI usage inside Workflows runs on separate credits, outside your normal plan.

The bottom line is that, across the teams we work with, on average maybe one in twenty people ever used it. For a long time, automation was the domain of a small circle of specialists.

A scheduled task is an instruction you write once and pair with a schedule. You find it in the sidebar under "Scheduled". A click opens the "Create scheduled task" dialog with three fields:

Right above the text field, you also attach the tools the task is allowed to use, and optionally pick an agent, more on that in a moment.

Frequency ranges from daily and every weekday to weekly or individual weekdays, each with a specific time. For our example, "every weekday", so Monday through Friday, fits well.

A plain text instruction can think and write, but on its own it cannot reach your calendar, your inbox, or Slack. You grant that access to the task once, and there are two ways to do it.

The simple path: attach tools directly

You attach the tools the task needs directly to the instruction, no agent involved. This is the new part, because it means anyone can now build an automation.

The second path: pick a ready-made agent

This path is worth it if you already have a ready-made agent with the right tools and instructions. You simply select it, and thanks to the latest update, you can now build such agents through chat. How you attach the tools in detail, you will see below in the setup.

Imagine it is 4 PM on an ordinary workday. Without you doing anything, this is what happens:

The actual setup is surprisingly short:

1. Open the dialog

   Under "Scheduled" in the sidebar, open the "Create scheduled task" dialog.

2. Give it a name

   Pick something clear as the name, for example "Meeting briefing for tomorrow".

3. Set the schedule

   For "When to run", set it to "every weekday" and enter "16:00" as the time.

4. Attach the tools

   In the instructions field, use the plus to attach the tools the task needs: Calendar, Gmail, Drive, Docs, and Slack. If you already have an agent with those tools, pick that agent at the top instead.

5. Write the instructions

   In the instructions, write the task in plain language. For example: "Look at my calendar for the meetings on the next workday. For each meeting, gather the relevant context from my recent emails, from Drive, and from Slack. Write a compact briefing per meeting, save it as a Google Doc in the Meeting Briefings folder, and then send me a short Slack message with the link."

6. Save

   Click "Save", done.

A task that only reads and answers runs without asking. But as soon as it changes something in the world, meaning it creates a document or sends a message, Langdock wants confirmation, once, that this is fine. For a task that should run on its own at four in the morning, that would be impractical, because it would just stop and wait for you.

An important difference from Workflows: scheduled tasks do not consume separate credits, they run on your normal usage allowance. That is convenient, but it has a flip side. Each run counts against your limit the same way as a chat you run yourself, except a scheduled task runs on its own, over and over, even when you are not watching.

The rule of thumb is: as rarely as necessary and as light as possible. How to keep an eye on your usage, we covered in detail in the last two editions, in May the usage limits themselves and in June the indicators that make your consumption visible. Both are worth a second look here, and the Langdock documentation goes deeper still.

The obvious win is the few minutes you no longer spend gathering things together. The real effect runs deeper. As long as you have to kick off every analysis yourself, it only happens when you think of it and have the time. A scheduled task turns "I should really do this" into "it is already done". Preparation that used to depend on your discipline becomes a fixed part of the day.

The briefing is just the start. The same pattern applies to many recurring tasks:

• A Friday afternoon weekly recapSummarizes your most important threads and decisions of the week.
• An early morning inbox reviewSorts your emails by urgency and highlights the three most important ones.
• A weekly topic radarCollects new content on a topic that matters to you, once a week.

After two or three weeks, you have a small collection of routines working in the background for you, without you giving them another thought.

That is exactly what scheduled tasks are about. They shift work away from the moment when you need time and a clear head, into a moment when nothing much is going on anyway. What is left is a morning when half your prep is already waiting for you.