# Cron & Scheduling

Scheduling is a first-class capability, not a workaround. The agent can set up recurring jobs ("every weekday at 9am, summarise my inbox"), one-off reminders ("nudge me about this in three hours"), and arbitrary agent runs on a cron schedule.

## Tools in the family

| Tool          | What it does                                                       |
| ------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------ |
| `cron_add`    | Create a new scheduled job - cron expression + agent prompt.       |
| `cron_list`   | List existing jobs and their next-run times.                       |
| `cron_update` | Edit an existing job - change schedule, prompt, or enabled state.  |
| `cron_remove` | Delete a job.                                                      |
| `cron_run`    | Run a job once, immediately, regardless of its schedule.           |
| `cron_runs`   | Inspect the recent run history - when, how long, what it produced. |

There's also a one-shot `schedule` tool in [System & Utilities](/openhuman/features/native-tools/system-and-utilities.md) for "do this once at time T" cases that don't need a recurring entry.

## What it's good for

* Daily / weekly digests delivered to your messaging channel of choice.
* Polling a slow integration that doesn't push events.
* Reminders the agent itself owns ("remind me Thursday to follow up with Alice").
* Recurring research - "every Monday, check what's new on this topic and write me a brief".

## How it ties back to the rest

Every cron run is just a normal agent invocation, so it can use any other tool - search the web, query the [Memory Tree](/openhuman/features/obsidian-wiki/memory-tree.md), call a [third-party integration](/openhuman/features/integrations.md), send a message. Run history is recorded so you can see what each tick produced.

## See also

* [System & Utilities](/openhuman/features/native-tools/system-and-utilities.md) - the one-shot `schedule` tool.
* [Agent Coordination](/openhuman/features/native-tools/agent-coordination.md) - for jobs that fan out into subagents.


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