From reactive to proactive agent

Imagine every morning at 7 you receive a Telegram message with a summary of news from your industry. Or the agent checks prices every hour and alerts you when they drop. All automatic.

This is done with cron jobs — scheduled tasks.

Cron in OpenClaw

{
  "cron": [
    {
      "schedule": "0 7 * * 1-5",
      "prompt": "Find the 5 most relevant AI news stories today. Write a brief summary of each in English.",
      "timezone": "Europe/London"
    }
  ]
}

Cron syntax

┌───── minute (0-59)
│ ┌───── hour (0-23)
│ │ ┌───── day of month (1-31)
│ │ │ ┌───── month (1-12)
│ │ │ │ ┌───── day of week (0-7)
* * * * *

Examples: 0 7 * * 1-5 (weekdays at 7:00), 0 */4 * * * (every 4 hours), 0 22 * * 5 (Fridays at 22:00).

Automation ideas

Morning briefing. Price monitoring. Weekly summary. Competitor watch.

Controlling token consumption

Limit output in the prompt. Reasonable frequency. Right model (cheap for routine tasks). Telegram limit: 4,096 characters per message.

Key concepts today

  • Cron job: A task that runs automatically at scheduled times
  • Cron syntax: 5 fields defining the schedule
  • Token control: Limit output, choose the right model, monitor consumption

Next lesson: Multiple agents — when one isn’t enough.