Cron in plain English

Build-along · ~12 min at your own keyboard

Scheduled triggers are the 'while you sleep' half of automation: every weekday at 6am, every Friday at 4, first of the month. Modern platforms take the schedule in plain English. Rule stands: schedule the deterministic scripts, not the unattended LLM. This is the engine behind lead-follow-up automation that never forgets a day-3 check-in.

Your starter: Weekly expired-and-withdrawn pull

Workflow steps

Make it yours: Point it at your MLS export path, set the day and hour your week starts, and decide what the first line of the note to you says.

WEEKLY PULL: expired and withdrawn listings, runs [day] at [hour]

1. Read the MLS export at [path]. Keep rows with status expired or withdrawn in the last 7 days in [your areas].
2. For each row: address, days on market, last list price, listing office. Nothing else.
3. Flag any row where the office is mine as DO NOT CONTACT.
4. Write the list to [folder]/expired-[date].md with the first line: '[n] expired this week in [areas].'
5. Do not draft outreach. Do not look up owners. The list is the whole job.
6. A row with a blank office column is [CHECK WITH BROKER: office] and goes last.
The list names the property, never the people: no owner names, ever.

If the export is missing or older than 8 days, write one line saying so and stop.

The coach checks that what you paste back is your own work. The starter pasted back unchanged won't pass.

Do this

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Share what happened

Paste the schedule, evidence of two untouched automatic runs, and their outputs (trimmed).