"Every weekday at 8" is easy to say and surprisingly easy to get wrong. A schedule set in UTC moves an hour against your own clock twice a year. A tool that only counts intervals can do "every 24 hours" but not "weekdays at 8". And "the last Friday of the month" usually ends up as a reminder in someone's calendar, because the automation has no way to say it.
As of this week, Lodol schedules work the way a calendar does. They run at your local time, in any time zone, and repeat the way people actually plan: every weekday, the first Monday of the month, or every two weeks until a date you choose.
Your time zone, not UTC
A schedule now runs at your local time, using your account's time zone unless you choose another, and daylight saving is handled for you. A run set for 9:00 in Chicago happens at 9:00 in March and at 9:00 in November, not an hour early or late for half the year.
Choosing another time zone is for the workflow that serves someone else's day. If your team is in London and the report is for the New York office, set that one schedule to New York time, and it arrives when they start work, whatever the clocks are doing on either side of the Atlantic.
Repeats the way a calendar does
Repeat daily, weekly on the days you pick, or monthly, on a date or on a weekday like the last Friday. Any of them can skip: every so many days, weeks or months. A few you might set:
| What you want | How to set it |
|---|---|
| A morning briefing every working day | Weekly, Monday to Friday, at 8:00 |
| Timesheet reminders every other Thursday | Every 2 weeks, on Thursday, at 15:00 |
| Last month's numbers on the 3rd | Monthly, on day 3, at 8:00 |
| A team update on the first Monday | Monthly, on the first Monday, at 10:00 |
| A check before month-end | Monthly, on the last Friday, at 14:00 |
| A quarterly review | Every 3 months, on day 1, at 9:00 |
A clean finish
Plenty of schedules aren't meant to run forever. A weekly status email for an eight-week project. A daily stock check while a sale is on. Reminders for the four Fridays before an audit. End a schedule on a date or after a set number of runs, and it stops cleanly when it's done, instead of carrying on until somebody remembers to switch it off.
Reads like a sentence
The canvas now shows each schedule in plain English, along the lines of "Run every 2 weeks on Thursday at 15:00", so anyone looking at a workflow can see when it will run without opening its settings. That matters more than it sounds. A teammate who inherits a workflow shouldn't have to decode it to know whether it ran last night.
Once, or every few minutes
All of this lives in the Run at time trigger, which can still run a workflow just once, at an exact date and time, such as the launch announcement at 9:00 on July 1: leave it set not to repeat. And Repeat on schedule still runs a workflow at a fixed interval, every so many minutes, hours or days, for jobs that are about how often rather than when.
Business days and holidays
A weekday schedule knows Monday from Saturday, but it doesn't know that the office is closed on the Fourth of July. For work that should only happen on business days, pair the schedule with Lodol's built-in date steps, which can check whether a date is a US public holiday. Put the work inside an If / Else that checks today, and on a holiday the run finds nothing to do and finishes.
Three habits for scheduled workflows
- If it's about an event, use a trigger. "When a new email arrives" or "when a Stripe payment comes in" is a job for a trigger, which starts a run for each event. A schedule that checks every hour does the same work up to an hour late, and has to work out which records it already handled.
- Look back exactly one interval. A daily run that reports on yesterday sees every day once. A weekday-only run that reports on yesterday never covers Friday or Saturday, so have Monday's run cover everything since Friday's, or run it every day.
- Don't let windows overlap. A daily run asking for "everything changed in the last 24 hours", started a few minutes late, can see the same record twice. End each window where the next one begins.
What to expect
A schedule only runs while its workflow is turned on, and each scheduled time starts one run, listed on the Runs page with everything it did.
And a schedule only decides when a workflow starts. What it does from there is the same every time: the steps you built, in the order you built them, whether it's 8:00 on a Monday or the last Friday in December.
Move the Monday report to Monday morning, your time.
Open a workflow, choose Run at time, set it to repeat, and check the sentence on the canvas reads the way you meant. Triggers and schedules in our docs has the details, and you can start free if you don't have a workspace yet.