Lesson 1 of 4
What You'll Build
Estimated time: 3 minutes
What You'll Build
In this course, you'll set up an automated morning briefing that delivers a personalized daily summary to your chat app — weather, calendar, tasks, and news — without lifting a finger.
Prerequisite
Make sure you've completed Getting Started with OpenClaw before this course. You need OpenClaw installed, the Gateway running, and a chat channel connected.
The Problem
Every morning, most people open 4-6 different apps just to get oriented: weather app, calendar, email, task manager, news feed. That's 10-15 minutes of context-switching before you've even started work.
The Solution
An OpenClaw cron job that gathers all this information and sends it as a single formatted message in your chat app. You read it once, you're caught up.
Architecture Overview
Schedule (cron) OpenClaw Gateway Chat Channel
┌──────────────┐ ┌─────────────────┐ ┌──────────────┐
│ Every day │──────>│ AI Agent runs │──────>│ Telegram / │
│ at 7:00 AM │ │ your prompt │ │ WhatsApp / │
└──────────────┘ │ │ │ Slack │
│ Calls skills: │ └──────────────┘
│ - Weather API │
│ - Calendar API │
│ - News API │
│ - Task API │
└─────────────────┘
OpenClaw's Gateway is the long-running service you set up in the Getting Started course. The cron system is built in — no external scheduler needed. You create a job, give it a prompt, and it delivers the result to your connected chat channel.
Course Structure
| Lesson | What You'll Do | Time |
|---|---|---|
| 1. What You'll Build | You are here — understand the architecture | 3 min |
| 2. Create Your Briefing | Set up the cron job and test it | 5 min |
| 3. Add Data Sources | Connect weather, calendar, and news APIs | 8 min |
| 4. Customize & Extend | Format output, add variations, go further | 5 min |
Lessons 1-2 are free
You can get a working briefing by the end of Lesson 2, using just OpenClaw's built-in AI capabilities. Lessons 3 and 4 add real-time data sources and advanced customization.
Quick Check
What does OpenClaw use to schedule your morning briefing?
Configuring Reliable Cron Jobs in OpenClaw
# Reliable Cron Jobs Cron jobs allow you to automate recurring tasks. Here is how to set them up effectively. ## 🛠 Basic Setup Add a new cron job using the CLI: ```bash openclaw cron add --name "...