Routines

Routines is the place where Claude keeps the tasks it repeats automatically on a schedule, without a person having to ask each time. Like a paperboy who drops off the newspaper at your door at the same time every morning, once you set it up, Claude keeps doing the same thing on its own from then on.

Tasks running inside Routines are built from two ingredients. One is a scheduled task that fires automatically at a set time, and the other is a connector that pulls in information from outside services like Slack or Notion. For example, a routine called 'Morning Brief' works by using these connectors to gather calendar and work data, then displaying the day's schedule sorted into three time blocks on screen every morning at a set time.

What matters here is that Routines itself isn't a completely new invention. It's closer to a menu that bundles the existing scheduled-execution feature and the existing external-connection feature together, giving users one place to manage recurring tasks at a glance.

The article reports that Claude's sidebar shows the menu items 'New, Artifacts, Routines, Dispatch, Customize, More' side by side. A common misunderstanding here is thinking Morning Brief is a separate new screen from Routines, when in fact it's just one item mixed in among other routines in the recent tasks list. In other words, Routines isn't a standalone feature but the name of the larger menu that gathers recurring tasks together.