Routines¶
Most of Questo runs when you ask it to. This page is about the parts that run without you.
A routine is Questo's own recurring work. Routines live in settings, fire as background runs, and send anything needing your judgement to the inbox rather than deciding on your behalf.
What you control¶
Routines are built into Questo. You can turn any of them on or off, run one right away, and see its past runs from the menu on its row.
You cannot edit a routine's prompt, name or schedule.
That is a real constraint and it is worth being straight about it. Routines are the parts of Questo that only work if they behave predictably, and a daily plan that every customer has rewritten is not a feature Questo can improve. If you want recurring work shaped your own way, run it as a mission: the routines then work that mission on your behalf, day to day.
The routines¶
Settings lists them under Daily, Weekly and Custom (a routine that fires on several weekdays, like the knowledge update), in the order they fire. Each has its own page: why it exists, what it does and how to tune it.
| Routine | When | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Mission planning | Weekdays, morning | Writes a diagnosis per active mission (what changed, where milestones stand, a health verdict), then proposes its day plan: the tasks worth doing, each with the reason it is there. Skipped on days with no active mission. |
| Insight extraction: Questo | Weekdays, late afternoon | Reads Questo's own outputs and captures what bears on your active missions as insights. |
| Insight request | Daily, after the extractors | Asks you up to three questions per mission that nothing else can answer. |
| Knowledge update | Monday, Wednesday and Friday, after work | Keeps your tenets and competitor and persona records true: weighs what was captured since its last run, plus a web scan, and writes each well-supported fact straight in. Undo any edit from History. |
| Roadmap review | Weekly, after the weekly report | Keeps each active mission's next four weeks true, writing a week only where it changes the plan. Posts no card; changes show in the mission's history. |
| Weekly report | Weekly, Sunday night | Recaps what actually happened in the past week, per mission. |
A workspace also gets one Insight extraction routine per connected integration, created when you connect it, so a workspace with Slack and Gmail connected has two more. Disconnect the integration and its extractor goes with it.
Everything the routines produce is described in more detail in how a mission iterates, because that is what they are collectively for.
They run in order, not just on a clock¶
The chain matters more than the times. Insight request waits for the extractors to finish, because its whole job is asking about what the automated pass could not find. Mission planning writes each mission's diagnosis first and plans against it in the same run.
So the times in the table are when a stage becomes eligible, not a promise about the minute. A stage that is waiting on the one before it will run when that one is done.
If an upstream routine fails, the chain does not stall. The next stage runs anyway, with a gap in what it knows, and the failure surfaces to you rather than silently freezing tomorrow's plan.
Turning them off¶
Turning a routine off is a normal thing to do, not an admission of defeat.
If you do not run missions week to week, the weekly report is noise, and noise in the inbox costs more than the report is worth. If you find the daily questions intrusive, turn off insight request and the rest of the chain carries on without it.
One is worth keeping if you keep any: mission planning, because its daily diagnosis is the only thing tracking whether your missions are working.
Before you turn everything off, try the cheaper fix. Most inbox noise is not too many routines, it is too many active missions. Five active missions is five plans, five updates and up to fifteen questions every day. Pausing the missions you are not actually working this week quiets everything at once and keeps the machinery for the ones you are.
What background runs cannot do¶
A background run has nobody at the screen, and Questo takes that literally rather than guessing on your behalf.
An unattended run cannot approve its own proposals, cannot resolve inbox cards, and cannot approve a plan, which also means it cannot spawn further background work. It reads, it does its work, and anything that needs a decision waits for you.
This is why a routine that wants something from you asks with a card instead of assuming. See what the agent asks about.