Routines
What routines are
A job Gini has already done, promoted to a schedule — the same work, on Mondays at 9:00, without anyone asking.
This is where Gini stops being a tool your team uses and becomes work your team no longer does.
Nothing about the job changes when it becomes a routine. The report you asked for three Mondays running is the same report. It just stops needing you to ask.
They start from work that already happened
Routines aren't configured from scratch. They're built out of a run that went well, which means the shape of the output is already something you've seen and approved, not something you're guessing at from a form.
You@Gini pull the weekly growth numbers again: signups, activation, churn, by channel.
Gini
Posted below.
That's the third Monday running. Want me to take it over? Every Monday at 9:00 in this channel, same figures, same sources. You'd get a heads-up if anything moves more than 20%.
Say yes and it's live. Say no and it doesn't ask again.
What a routine carries
- The work: what to do, in Gini's own words, editable
- When: a schedule, or a trigger
- Where: the channel it posts to
- What it can reach: the tools and files it uses
- Whose access: routines run with the access of the person who owns them
That last point matters. A routine reading HubSpot uses its owner's HubSpot access. If they leave and their connection goes, the routine stops rather than falling back to something broader.
Approvals still apply
A routine can do anything you could ask for in a channel, under the same rules. If a scheduled job reaches something irreversible, it stops and posts an approval in its channel, exactly as it would if you'd asked live.
So a routine that drafts your invoice reminders will draft them and wait. A routine that reads and reports doesn't stop at all.
Routines that need a person aren't broken
A routine that pauses every week for the same approval is telling you something: either that step should be split out, or you've found a job you genuinely want a human in. Both are fine. What you shouldn't do is go looking for a setting that makes it stop asking: approval policy isn't customer configuration, and the answer is to change the job.
What they cost
A routine costs credits each time it runs, at the same rate as asking for the work directly: typically 125–375 for a recurring job. A weekly report is roughly 375 credits a week.
That's the number to think about when you're deciding whether to run something daily or weekly. How credits work has the arithmetic.
Good candidates
The test: would you notice if it didn't happen?
- The Monday report someone assembles by hand
- The stale-deal sweep nobody remembers to do
- Post-meeting follow-up: notes filed, tasks created, CRM updated
- A weekly digest of what changed in a tool your team doesn't live in
- Watching a number and speaking up when it moves
Bad candidates are jobs where the answer changes shape every time, and jobs where a wrong output goes straight to a customer without anyone reading it.