Scheduling - Vellum Docs

Your assistant doesn't just respond when you talk to it. It can also work on its own, on a schedule you define. Scheduling lets you set up tasks that run automatically: once at a specific time, or repeatedly on a cadence.

Think of it as giving your assistant a calendar of its own. Instead of waiting for you to ask, it can check things, send things, and surface things proactively.

Why scheduling matters

Most AI assistants are purely reactive. You ask, they answer. But a lot of useful work is repetitive and time-based: checking for updates, sending reminders, generating reports, following up on things that went quiet.

Scheduling turns your assistant from something you talk to into something that works for you in the background. It's the difference between a tool you pick up and an assistant that's actually assisting.

Types of scheduled work

There are three flavors of scheduled work, each suited to different needs.

One-shot schedules

A single task that fires at a specific time. Set it and forget it.

"Remind me to call the dentist tomorrow at 9am"
"Send Marina a follow-up email on Friday if she hasn't replied"
"Check the deployment status in 30 minutes and let me know"

Recurring schedules

Tasks that repeat on a cadence: daily, weekly, every Monday at 8am, first of the month. These use standard cron expressions or recurrence rules under the hood, but you don't need to know that. Just describe what you want in plain language.

"Every morning at 8am, give me a summary of my calendar and unread emails"
"Every Friday afternoon, compile a weekly status update from my Slack activity"
"On the 1st of each month, remind me to review my subscriptions"

Heartbeats

Heartbeats are a special kind of recurring schedule designed for background monitoring. Instead of performing a specific task, a heartbeat runs a checklist at regular intervals: checking conditions, verifying that things are healthy, and only surfacing issues when something needs your attention.

"Every hour, check if any important emails came in and notify me"
"Every 15 minutes, check my Slack for any direct messages I haven't seen"
"Periodically check if that website I'm monitoring has changed"

Use cases

Here are some common ways people use scheduling:

Morning briefings. Start each day with a summary of your calendar, unread messages, and anything that needs your attention. Delivered before you even open the app.
Follow-up tracking. Sent someone an important email? Schedule a check for whether they replied. If they haven't, get a nudge.
Recurring reports. Weekly summaries, monthly reviews, or daily digests compiled automatically from your connected tools.
Reminders with context. Not just "do the thing" but "here's the thing, here's the context I gathered, and here's what you need to decide."
Background monitoring. Watch for changes in a website, a Slack channel, a shared document, or an inbox. Get notified only when something actually happens.
Automated workflows. Combine scheduling with other skills to build workflows that run themselves: pull data, format it, send it somewhere, log it.

How scheduling connects to other concepts

Scheduling doesn't exist in isolation. It ties into the rest of the system:

Skills and tools. Scheduled tasks can use any skill your assistant has access to: Gmail, Slack, browser, calendar, file operations, and more. A schedule is just a trigger; the skills are what actually do the work.
Memory. Your assistant remembers the results of scheduled tasks. If it checked your email this morning and found something important, it can reference that later in conversation.
Playbooks. While schedules are time-based, playbooks are event-based (triggered by incoming messages or other events). They complement each other: use schedules for "every Monday at 9am" and playbooks for "whenever someone emails me about invoices."
Notifications. Scheduled tasks can send you notifications when they find something worth reporting. Quiet when everything is fine, loud when it matters.

What happens when you're away

Scheduled tasks run as long as the Vellum daemon is running on your machine. If your computer is asleep or shut down, tasks won't fire until it wakes back up.

This is a deliberate design choice. Your assistant runs locally, which means your data stays on your machine. The tradeoff is that it needs your machine to be on. For most people, this means schedules work great during the workday and any time the computer is awake.

Setting up a schedule

You don't need to learn cron syntax or configure anything manually. Just tell your assistant what you want in plain language:

"Every weekday at 8am, give me a morning briefing
with my calendar, unread emails, and any Slack
messages I missed overnight."

The assistant will figure out the right schedule type, set up the recurrence, and confirm the details with you before activating it. You can modify or cancel any schedule the same way: just ask.

For more technical details on how to configure schedules, see the skills reference pages for Schedule and Heartbeat.