Common foundation
Scheduled routines without runaway costs
Four orchestrators (morning, evening, weekly, monthly) driven by plans written in files, rather than twenty scattered tasks.
The problem
The temptation is to create one scheduled task per need. After two months you have twenty-five of them, each reloading its own context, stepping on one another, sending six notifications a day and eating up a significant share of your quota.
Figure. A week of routines: three daily, one weekly, one monthly.
Step-by-step method
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Group them into four orchestrators:
- MORNING (daily): health check, email triage, roadmap for the day;
- EVENING (daily): second email pass, update of ongoing projects, pending decisions;
- WEEKLY (Friday): academic deadlines, thesis defences at D-14, literature watch, month-ahead horizons;
- MONTHLY (the 1st): CV, activity history, file index, backup.
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A one-line prompt: “read your run plan”. The plan is a Markdown file (
_SYSTEME/ORCHESTRATEURS/PLAN_MATIN.md). Adding a watch becomes adding a line to a file, not creating a task. -
Set a budget: a cap on tool calls per run, a single pass, a consumption log. A lighter model is enough for most scheduled tasks; check which model the task is created with.
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Monitor: a status-light page (green, amber, red) fed by the orchestrators themselves, to detect silent failures.
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Notify only when an action is expected.
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Check the state after any pause: after a general pause of tasks, list those that are active, paused or disabled, and only re-enable with your approval.
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An incident log: when a source is unavailable (mailbox not connected, index too large, lost mount), the routine says so, proposes a workaround, and never concludes “nothing new”.
Deliverable
Four tasks, four plan files, one shared rules file, a log and a monitoring page.
Lessons learned
- A silent failure (attachment extraction broken for two weeks) justified the monitoring page.
- A plan too heavy for its cap gets cut off: two short runs are better than one long one.
- Replaced tasks are renamed “ARCHIVE” and disabled, never deleted.
Starter prompt
Here is the list of my scheduled tasks. Propose grouping them into 4 orchestrators, write a Markdown run plan for each, and estimate consumption before/after. Do not create or modify any task without my approval.