Automation
Make your agent proactive with heartbeats, scheduled tasks, and cron jobs.
Heartbeats
A heartbeat is a periodic "pulse" that wakes your agent up to do background work — even when nobody is chatting with it. Think of it as a schedule that says "every 30 minutes, check on things."
What happens during a heartbeat is defined in a structured markdown file. You can configure:
📅 Time-Based Sections
Define blocks tied to times of day — e.g., "Morning (7:00–9:00): check news and send a summary." The agent only runs sections that match the current time.
🎯 Targets
Where should heartbeat output be delivered? Targets can be specific users, channels, or groups on any connected platform.
✅ Tasks
A checklist of things to do during heartbeats. Each task can have sub-steps and tags. Tasks can be marked complete to track progress.
📋 Rules & Proactive Work
Guidelines for how the agent should behave during heartbeats, and a list of ongoing proactive work items the agent should chip away at.
📆 Weekly Tasks
Tasks tied to specific days of the week — "Monday: review PRs" or "Friday: send weekly summary."
Managing Heartbeats in ClawManager
The Heartbeat Manager in ClawManager gives you a visual editor for all of this. You can:
- • View a timeline of your heartbeat sections
- • Edit tasks, targets, rules, and proactive work
- • Toggle heartbeats on/off and set the interval (e.g., every 15, 30, or 60 minutes)
- • Pause and resume heartbeats without losing configuration
- • Use a cheaper model for heartbeats to save costs
Cron Jobs
Cron jobs are scheduled messages sent to your agent at specific times. Unlike heartbeats (which are general "check on things" pulses), cron jobs are specific tasks with specific schedules.
Examples:
- • "Every morning at 8am, summarize my unread emails"
- • "Every hour, check server health"
- • "Every Friday at 5pm, draft a weekly report"
- • "Every 30 minutes, scan for new GitHub issues"
Creating a Cron Job
In ClawManager's Cron Manager, click Add Job to create one:
Monitoring Cron Jobs
The Cron Manager shows stats for each job: next run time, last run time, total runs, and success/failure history. You can view the full run history for any job, pause individual jobs, or trigger a manual run.
Heartbeats vs. Cron Jobs
| Heartbeats | Cron Jobs | |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | General background awareness | Specific scheduled tasks |
| Schedule | Fixed interval (every N minutes) | Cron expression or interval |
| Content | Time-aware sections, tasks, rules | A single message/prompt |
| Best for | Always-on awareness | Specific recurring tasks |
Many users use both: heartbeats for general proactive behavior, and cron jobs for specific scheduled tasks.
Next Steps
Make sure your automated agent is safe with Security settings, or head to Troubleshooting if something isn't working.