Scheduled Actions Updates: What’s New and How to Use Them

0:00 Welcome everyone to today's video where we're going to be discussing Scheduled Actions and the recent updates that OpenAI has pushed for them.

0:10 So, just as a reminder, Scheduled Actions are tasks that you want your digital employee to perform on a regular basis for you.

0:19 So, as an example, say you're a lawyer for immigration that really needs to know the updates in immigration law. Well, you can set a scheduled task for every morning at 8 a.m.

0:32 to go and search the U.S. government immigration website and let you know of any updates that have occurred and the implications for your clients.

0:42 Another scheduled task could be, say your job is really dependent on weather conditions. Well, you could tell it to go.

0:48 Search the weather, let me know if it's below freezing, and if it is, please send me an email to me and my team as an example.

0:57 So anything that needs to occur on a repeated basis.

1:01 So with that, let's dive into some of the updates. So, the first is that the home of these scheduled tasks has changed.

1:09 Now, you'll find it in this left sidebar, which makes it really easy to access, to schedule tasks, or to edit existing tasks.

1:17 Before, you had to go into the settings page to edit, to see what tasks you had scheduled, and it was just kind of hidden.

1:25 And so now, it's a lot more prominent, and it shows this push by OpenAI to get users to use scheduled tasks more.

1:33 It's quite convenient, when you click into scheduled tasks, you can see which tasks you have actively running. By the way, anytime you see this blue dot, that indicates that the task has gone, run, and it has an update for you to read.

1:48 And so, you'll see that pop update, uhm, right here at the top. You can see that the chat continues for every time that it's run this task, but it'll always open you to the updated information.

2:02 And so, you can go and read it. Now, an important piece of information is that if you ever neglect these tasks for a certain amount of time, meaning you're not opening them when that blue dot is there, it will actually automatically pause that task for you.

2:19 So, when I go and I look at my You pause tasks, you'll see that there's actually quite a few in here, because I had just not opened them for some time, and OpenAI chose to pause them for me.

2:32 However, I can easily just resume any tasks by clicking this play button here, and you'll see now it lives in my active category,

2:40 So this is actually the page that you'll come to to schedule a new task. And according to OpenAI, one of the updates includes faster and more reliable scheduled tasks.

2:53 It also allows you to schedule tasks for a window of time. rather than, hey, go and do this every day at exactly 9.15 a.m.

3:02 So you can say, and I'll pull up an example that I recently scheduled, you can say that I want you to run this every morning.

3:11 So in my example, I asked every morning, oops, every morning, please look at my Google Calendar to see what events I have scheduled.

3:22 Then go and do research about each and send me a short brief within this chat. on how I can prepare.

3:31 So you see, in this prompt, I've specified the time at which I want it to occur and I've given it the information, I want you to go to Google Calendar looking for events,

3:42 And then you see I've also given it the integral. So once I've given it this prompt, what you want to see is this done and this confirmation that it has occurred.

3:51 And so I encourage you to look at that box, open it up, and what you'll see is its revision of my prompt.

3:59 And so this is good for you as the human to go and do that check and make sure that all the details that it's added are aligned with what you want it to actually do.

4:08 In my case, this looks good. And it actually, you see, says, keep it concise and practical. And that's because I have this instruction in my managed memory.

4:17 And so I love that I don't have to retell it this every single time, but it has that context and it knows the writing style and tone that I like already.

4:26 Uhm, then you see it is repeating daily. The time is in the morning. Perfect. And I don't ever want it to stop.

4:34 As long as it's doing this well, I want it to do this forever for me. So, once you have that, that's a good check to make sure that the schedule changes.

4:42 And I action is going to run successfully for you. However, with these connections, I always want to make sure that the output is as I would expect.

4:52 And so, I just did this one check. I said, thank you. I would like you to run this task one time for Wednesday, June 23rd.

4:58 So, I can see what the output looks like and give you necessary feedback. So, I'm just doing this so that I know that this is going to run as I expect.

5:08 And so, you see, it did. This was a busy day for me, which is why I chose it. And then, I can see exactly what kind of brief it's going to give me for each event.

5:18 And so this allows me to specify if I want it to go into ClickUp as well to pull information regarding the task, if it's relevant, or any additional information or context that I want to keep.

5:31 This is my time to see the context that it's currently working with, and then provide that feedback. And so you can do that, this is trained on human language, so you can go and just talk to it as if it were human in natural language, giving it that feedback.

5:46 as you would to a human colleague or counterpart.

5:51 just to summarize the changes here, the first change is that Scheduled Actions now lives on this left sidebar. The next is that Scheduled Actions have become a lot more faster.

6:02 and reliable. Next is that you can work with broader context windows. So you can say every morning rather than a specific time.

6:12 And finally, you can monitor tasks and search the web, check connected apps, so in this case, I had it go and check Google Calendar, and it is possible that it notifies you only when a certain condition has been met.

6:27 So in that weather example, now it's possible that it can go, check if the weather is below that set time.

6:33 threshold, and then only act if that condition has met before scheduled tasks would run under every single circumstance, whether or not that condition was met.

6:44 So these are the changes. Hopefully this video served as a reminder for you that, hey, scheduled tasks and scheduled actions do exist, and they are powerful within ChatGPT, and hopefully it gave you a little bit of inspiration about scheduled actions that could take some of that load off your day so

7:01 that you can spend more time doing the human things that matter.