Your First Automation: An Agent That Runs Monday Mornings

The best automations are boring: a report that exists every Monday at 8am without anyone remembering to make it. Here is the whole recipe for your first one, using a competitive digest as the example.

1. Write the task once

Create an automation and give it the instruction you would give a person:

Search for news about [your three competitors] from the last 7 days. Compare against the previous digest in /Competitive/Digests. Write what changed, with citations, to a new dated file in that folder. If nothing meaningful changed, say so in one paragraph.

Specific folder, specific comparison, specific output: automations reward the same clarity as delegation to a human.

2. Schedule it

Pick the cadence: weekly, Monday, 08:00. The agent runs whether or not you are online; results land in Drive and the run appears in history with its full trace.

3. Bound it

Set the run budget: a cap on what one execution may spend. A digest like this costs cents; the cap makes the worst case a known number. Budgets plus the run trace are what make unattended agents safe to trust with a schedule; see the autonomy dial for the full oversight picture.

4. Read the first run, then stop reading

Check the first Monday's output and correct anything structural ("shorter, lead with pricing changes"): corrections stick via the agent's memory. By the third run you skim; by the fifth it is infrastructure.

Good automations to steal

• Inbox zero for a folder: summarize whatever landed in /Inbox this week and propose filing.
• Benchmark re-runs: re-ask your standard evaluation prompt when new models land, and file the comparison (researchers run this one).
• Site checks: fetch three pages you care about and diff their claims against your notes.

Good to know

• Automations are cron-scheduled agents; everything an agent can do, a scheduled one can.
• Notifications tell you when a run needs attention; silence means it worked.
• The competitive monitoring workflow is this guide's example, productized.

Build the Monday digest now; it takes ten minutes and pays every week. The automations feature page covers cadences, budgets, and history.