# Scheduled tasks and watchdog

> Companions work on their own time: recurring routines run on a schedule, and a watchdog resumes work the moment an external signal fires.

## Scheduled tasks

Recurring routines run without a human prompting them — a morning brief at 8am, a weekly review on Fridays, a monitoring check every hour:

- Schedules are defined by **cron expression or natural language** ("every weekday at 8am"), with timezone support.
- Each companion has its own tasks; every workspace agent is polled in parallel, so schedules hold even with several companions.
- An execution creates a normal conversation thread — same memory, same tools, same visibility as an interactive session. Tasks missed while the app was offline run at the next startup.
- Tasks are managed from the desktop settings or by the companion itself when a human describes a rhythm in conversation.

## Watchdog

The watchdog keeps multi-step work moving when it depends on the outside world:

- **External signals**: a companion can register a wait on a CI run, a pull-request status, or a timer — and be woken up the moment it resolves, instead of polling by hand.
- **Stale thread supervision**: pending threads are periodically scanned and classified; work that stalled gets nudged or re-executed, work that became irrelevant is closed.
- **Visible activity**: watchdog decisions are logged and visible in the desktop settings, so autonomy never becomes opacity.

## Tasks and delegation

Companions also maintain a persistent task backlog — created from conversations, Slack, or GitHub events — with priorities, statuses, and **delegation between companions**: a task can be handed to the teammate best suited for it.

## Related

- [Skills](https://tamag0.ai/docs/skills.md)
- [Collaboration](https://tamag0.ai/docs/collaboration.md)
- [Thread lifecycle](https://tamag0.ai/docs/thread-lifecycle.md)
- [Integrations](https://tamag0.ai/docs/integrations.md)