> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.parallellabs.app/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Scheduled

> Give an AI employee standing work: tasks that run once, on a repeating schedule, or continuously through the working day.

Chat is work you ask for in the moment. **Scheduled** is work that happens without you — a task you write once, assigned to an AI employee, that runs on its own and reports back.

## What a Scheduled Task Is

A task is a prompt plus a schedule. At the scheduled time, the prompt is sent to the AI employee you picked, exactly as if you had typed it in chat. The employee does the work using its knowledge base, integrations, and tools, and the result is saved to the task's run history.

Typical uses:

* A morning briefing of overnight replies and new leads
* A weekly summary of campaign performance
* Recurring research — competitor pricing, industry news, brand mentions
* Routine list upkeep, such as enriching new rows
* Anything you would otherwise remember to ask for every day

## Creating a Task

1. Select your company from the sidebar
2. Click **Scheduled**
3. Click **New Task**
4. Fill in the task:
   * **Task Name** — how it appears in the list
   * **AI Employee** — who does the work
   * **Prompt** — the instruction sent at the scheduled time
5. Choose a schedule type (below)
6. Save

The prompt is the whole instruction. Write it as if the employee has no memory of the conversation, because each run starts fresh.

## Schedule Types

| Type          | When it runs                                            | Good for                                                         |
| ------------- | ------------------------------------------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **One-time**  | Once, on a date and time you pick                       | A reminder or a one-off job you don't want to do now             |
| **Recurring** | Daily, weekly, or monthly at a set time                 | Briefings, reports, regular check-ins                            |
| **Heartbeat** | Repeatedly on an interval, during working hours you set | Work that should be picked up through the day, not at one moment |

### One-time

Pick a **Date** and a **Time**. The task runs once and then stops.

### Recurring

Pick a **Frequency** — Daily, Weekly, or Monthly — and a **Time**. Weekly tasks also let you tick which **Days of Week** to run on.

### Heartbeat

A heartbeat task runs continuously on an interval during the active hours you set, rather than at a single scheduled moment. Set the **Interval**, the **Start** and **End** of its active hours, and the days of the week it should be active.

This suits work that needs picking up as it arrives — watching for replies, reacting to new rows in a list — instead of being batched into one daily run.

## Managing Tasks

The task list shows each task with its **Schedule**, **Next Run**, number of **Runs**, and an **Avg Score** with a trend, plus a status dot.

From a task's menu you can:

* **Edit** — change the prompt, employee, or schedule
* **Pause** / **Resume** — stop a task running without deleting it
* **Evaluate** — score how well the runs are going
* **Reset Task History** — clear the run history, evaluations, and daily counters
* **Delete** — remove the task

Click a task to open its run history and read what the employee actually did on each run.

## Scoring and Evaluation

Runs can be scored so you can see whether a task is doing useful work over time. The **Avg Score** column and the trend next to it summarize this at a glance; open **Evaluate** on a task for the detail.

A task whose score is drifting down usually needs a sharper prompt — see the prompt tips in [Chat](/overview/chat).

## Tips

1. **Be explicit about output.** "Summarize in five bullets" produces a more consistent result than "tell me what happened."
2. **Pick the right employee.** The task inherits that employee's instructions, knowledge, and integrations.
3. **Start with one-time.** Run a task once to see the output before putting it on a schedule.
4. **Use heartbeat sparingly.** It runs many times a day and uses credits on every run.
5. **Pause instead of deleting** while you are tuning a prompt — you keep the history.

## Next Steps

* [Create an AI Employee](/overview/employees)
* [Chat with your AI employees](/overview/chat)
* [Add Knowledge for tasks to draw on](/overview/knowledge-base)