Scheduled Tasks & Automations
Claude Cowork supports scheduled tasks that run automatically on a cadence — daily, weekly, or monthly. You define the task once; Cowork handles the rest.
What you can automate today
- → Weekly digests — summarise new files, emails, or data drops every Monday morning
- → Monthly clean-ups — archive old files, flag stale records, or generate status reports
- → Recurring data sync — extract structured data from a watched folder automatically on a cadence
- → Compliance audits — check a shared drive for naming or format violations on a schedule
Setting up a scheduled task
- Open Claude Cowork and navigate to Automations in the sidebar.
- Click New scheduled task and describe what you want Cowork to do.
- Choose a schedule: daily, weekly, monthly, or a custom cron expression.
- Grant only the folder and connector access the task needs — principle of least privilege.
- Save and enable. Cowork will run the task automatically on your chosen cadence.
⚠️ Safety rules for automations
- 1. Start with low-risk, read-only tasks before granting write access.
- 2. Never schedule message-sending (email, Slack) without a human review step.
- 3. Never schedule deletions — move to a review folder instead.
- 4. Require confirmation for any destructive or irreversible actions.
- 5. Test on a copy of real data before enabling on production folders.
- 6. Review the first few runs manually before trusting full automation.
Common automation use-cases
Weekly digest
Summarise new files added to a shared folder each week. Runs every Monday at 8 am.
Monthly clean-up
Move files older than 90 days to an archive folder. Runs on the 1st of each month.
Data sync
Extract structured rows from new CSV drops into a master spreadsheet. Runs daily at midnight.
Compliance audit
Scan a shared drive for files that violate naming conventions. Flags issues in a report each Friday.