Workflows
Workflows
Lobster runs ~27 recurring cron jobs on the host. Most fire overnight or in narrow morning/evening windows: memory consolidates while you sleep, reminders arrive at the moments they’re useful, inbox triage happens before you sit down at your laptop, and a steady drumbeat of health checks keeps the gateway honest.
This page is a registry — name, schedule, what it does, and a pointer to the deep-dive guide where one exists. Everything below runs via OpenClaw’s cron subsystem; create or edit jobs with /lobster-cron-manage or openclaw cron.
Memory and reflection
Lobster builds up context about the owner and the household over time. These jobs do the writing.
| Workflow | Schedule | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Daily Log Writer | 9:55 PM Pacific | Summarizes the day’s gateway activity — sessions, tool calls, notable events — into a structured daily log under ~/.openclaw/agents/lobster/workspace/memory/. |
| Obsidian Daily Note | 10:00 PM Pacific | Writes a daily journal entry into the shared Obsidian vault with YAML frontmatter, mood reflection, and links to the day’s events. Family members read it on any device. |
| Daily Agent Standup | 10:05 PM Pacific | Cross-agent standup: each Lobster sub-agent reports what it did, what failed, what’s queued. Three agents file; one consolidated note lands in memory. |
| Memory Dreaming Promotion | 3:00 AM | Promotes high-signal items from the daily log into long-term memory. Low-signal items decay. Inspired by sleep-stage memory consolidation. |
| Daily Personal Context Question | 9:00 AM Pacific | Picks an unanswered thread from the memory files and asks the owner one question over iMessage. The next day’s run files the answer. Over weeks the context deepens without an explicit interview. |
Calendar and reminders
Proactive nudges for moments that would otherwise slip — early/late meetings, weekday medication, weekend activities, family birthdays.
| Workflow | Schedule | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Late Meeting Reminder | 5:00 PM Pacific daily | Checks today’s work calendar for meetings after 8 PM and texts the owner. Calendar titles are sanitized for prompt-injection before reaching the model. See Meeting Reminders. |
| Early Meeting Reminder | 9:00 PM Pacific daily | Same idea for tomorrow’s 7–8 AM meetings, sent the night before. See Meeting Reminders. |
| Birthday Card | 8:00 AM Pacific daily | Reads a Birthdays.md registry, generates a personalized card on the day, and sends a 7-day heads-up for upcoming ones. Family members receive their own messages. |
| Weekly Social Commitments | Sundays at 5:00 PM Pacific | Pulls the shared family calendar for the coming week and posts a digest into the family group chat — kid activities, social events, who’s where. |
| Weekday Medication Check | Weekdays at 11:35 AM Pacific (+ 11:40 follow-up) | Pings the household member who takes weekday meds, then a follow-up five minutes later if there’s no acknowledgement. |
| Friday Activity Reminder | Fridays at 8:00 PM Pacific | Late-evening reminder about a scheduled Saturday activity that’s easy to forget after a long week. |
Inbox and content
The “I’ll never read it” tax handled while you’re not looking.
| Workflow | Schedule | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Daily Instapaper Podcast | 1:00 AM Pacific | Turns every article saved to the Instapaper Newsletter folder that day into a Spotify episode. OpenAI TTS narrates, per-article cover art is generated, and each episode is tagged with its source publication. See “A daily podcast made from the newsletters you didn’t read”. |
| Daily X Bookmarks | 3:00 AM Pacific | Fetches the previous day’s X bookmarks via OAuth read-only scopes and writes one digest to inbox/YYYY-MM-DD-x-bookmarks.md — author, full text, permalink, public metrics. State file deduplicates seen IDs. Runs from the system crontab (not OpenClaw) because it’s deterministic work that doesn’t need LLM reasoning. |
| Daily Brief | 4:00 AM Pacific | Step 1: routes action-verb lines (I need to…, Remind me to…, TODO) from any inbox/*.md into Apple Reminders via the inbox-to-reminders script. Step 2: reads everything new in inbox/ (24h) and notes/ (7d). Step 3: writes inbox/session-summary-YYYY-MM-DD.md with 3 Connections (cross-references between recent captures and older notes), 1 Pattern, and 1 Question worth sitting with today. Isolated session, light-context, no chat delivery. |
| Weekly Synthesis | Sundays at 9:00 AM Pacific | Reads the past 7 days across inbox/, notes/, and ideas/ and produces an Emerging Thesis / Contradictions / Knowledge Gaps / One Action report. Writes the markdown to inbox/weekly-synthesis-YYYY-MM-DD.md and an inline-styled HTML rendering to /tmp/, then emails both via iCloud SMTP (multipart/alternative) so it arrives in the inbox before Monday. |
| Daily Archive Sweep | 11:00 AM Pacific | Cleans up read mail, archives finished threads, files commitments into the right folders. Email triage that doesn’t need to interrupt your morning. |
Community and events
Group-chat hygiene and personal-circuit awareness.
| Workflow | Schedule | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Friend Group Weekly Check-In | Wednesdays at 7:00 PM Pacific | Posts a “who’s going?” message into a regular friend group chat ahead of the recurring weekend gathering. Tracks the replies and reports the headcount. |
| Social Circuit Monthly Review | 1st of each month at 9:00 AM Pacific | Reflects on the past month’s social contact — who you saw, who you haven’t talked to in a while, who has a birthday coming up. A nudge to keep the network warm. |
| Seattle Events Monthly Email | 1st of each month at 9:00 AM Pacific | HTML email with a curated digest of upcoming concerts, comedy, theater, and sports events. Grouped by category, scannable, links to ticket pages. |
Health and monitoring
Background hygiene. Mostly silent — you only hear from these when something breaks.
| Workflow | Schedule | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Family Location Tracker | Twice daily, 5:00 AM and 2:00 PM UTC | Queries Travel Hub for trip itineraries and writes per-family-member location state to heartbeat-state.json. Other automations read from there instead of querying trip data directly. See Family Location Tracker. |
| Eight Sleep Away Mode | Twice daily, 5:10 AM and 2:10 PM UTC | Reads familyLocations and toggles each sleeper’s Eight Sleep base into Away mode when they’re not home, saving energy and preserving schedules. |
| Auth Health Check | 8:00 AM Pacific daily | OAuth token sink audit. Detects duplicate profiles, expired refresh tokens, and cross-agent credential drift before they cause runtime auth failures. |
| Security Audit | 9:00 AM Pacific daily | Runs lobster-harden and writes a compliance score (0–100) over auth mode, exec approvals, sandbox scope, and credential exposure. Alerts on regression. |
| OpenClaw Release Check | 9:00 AM Pacific daily | Polls upstream releases, summarizes changes relevant to the local configuration, and flags anything that would break on upgrade. |
| Plugin Smoke Test | Sundays at 10:00 AM Pacific | Exercises each installed plugin against its smoke fixtures. Catches regressions from upstream plugin updates before they affect a real interaction. |
How to add your own
Use /lobster-cron-manage (the ops skill that embeds the project’s cron best practices) or the raw openclaw cron create command. Read the bullets first:
- Deterministic, no-LLM work goes to launchd, not cron. Pure shell-on-schedule (rotation, sync, cleanup) doesn’t need an agent turn. Use a LaunchAgent.
- Cron-via-agent is for jobs that need reasoning. Anything that picks what to say, decides who to notify, or synthesizes context belongs in an agent cron.
- Deliver from the runner, not from the agent. Cron payloads should set
delivery.mode: "none"and have the runner callopenclaw message senddirectly. Avoidannouncemode for conditional jobs. - Use
--light-contextunless the job genuinely needs full bootstrap.
For deeper guidance see lobster-cron-manage and the OpenClaw cron docs at https://docs.openclaw.ai.