Schedules and routines¶
Most of Questo runs when you ask it to. This page is about the parts that run without you.
There are two kinds, and the difference is who owns them. A schedule is yours. A routine is Questo's. Both live in settings, both fire as background runs, and both send anything needing your judgement to the inbox rather than deciding on your behalf.
Schedules: your recurring work¶
A schedule is a prompt plus a cadence. You write what you want done, you say how often, and it runs.
"Every Monday at 8am, check our three competitors' pricing pages and tell me what changed." "Every weekday morning, summarise anything new in the industry newsletters." "On the first of the month, draft the update to the customer list."
Cadence comes in three shapes: every weekday, weekly on a day you pick, or monthly on a date you pick. Times are yours in your own timezone, and they stay correct when you travel.
Schedules are entirely yours. You create them, you write the prompt, you set the cadence, you change or delete them whenever. If you can write a task prompt you can write a schedule.
Each firing is a background run, so the same rules apply as any other background work: it uses your full knowledge base, and nobody is at the screen to answer a question, so write the prompt to be unambiguous in a way a live chat prompt does not have to be.
A scheduled run produces a single deliverable, not a scatter of documents. Something that fires fifty times a year should hand you one thing to read each time, so the schedule page can show you the latest without you hunting through a pile.
Routines: Questo's recurring work¶
A routine looks similar and works differently. Routines are built into Questo, and the only control you have over one is on or off.
You cannot edit a routine's prompt, its cadence or its name.
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 something a routine nearly does but not quite, write a schedule for it instead. That is what schedules are for.
The five routines¶
| Routine | When | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Insight extraction | Late afternoon | Reads a connected tool and captures what bears on your active missions as insights. |
| Insight request | Late afternoon, after extraction | Asks you up to three questions per mission that nothing else can answer. |
| Mission update | Morning | Writes a diagnosis per active mission: what changed, where targets stand, a health verdict. |
| Mission planning | Morning, after the update | Proposes one day plan per active mission: a win condition and the tasks that serve it. |
| Weekly report | Sunday | Recaps what actually happened in the past week, per mission. |
Insight extraction is the one that is not a single routine. You get one per connected integration, created when you connect it, so a workspace with Slack and Gmail connected has two. 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 extraction to finish, because its whole job is asking about what the automated pass could not find. Mission planning waits for the mission update, because it plans against that morning's diagnosis.
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.
Two are worth keeping if you keep any: the mission update, because it is the only thing tracking whether your missions are working, and the planning routine it feeds.
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.