Cron Job Playbook

Why This Exists

Cron jobs are OpenClaw's killer feature. But the docs dont tell you:

• Which model to use (flash vs. sonnet vs. opus)
• What timeout to set (120s is too short for most tasks)
• How to configure delivery to Discord/Telegram
• Why your jobs silently fail

This playbook is extracted from 40+ production cron jobs running since February 2026.

What's Included

40 Cron Job Templates

Organized by category:

Monitoring (8 jobs)

• System health check (disk, memory, processes)
• Calendar reminder (30min intervals)
• Social engagement monitor
• Watchlist price alerts

Reporting (10 jobs)

• Morning briefing
• Self-critic analysis
• Weekly/Monthly/Quarterly reviews
• Sprint planning

Data Extraction (8 jobs)

• Fact extraction from sessions
• Recent messages archival
• Bookmark digest
• Cross-signal detection

Content (6 jobs)

• Social media draft generation
• Engagement briefing
• Content calendar updates

Maintenance (8 jobs)

• QMD index update
• Memory cleanup
• Git auto-commit
• OpenClaw update check

The Failure Guide

12 common cron failures we've debugged:

1. model not found — wrong model alias
2. delivery failed — missing channel: prefix
3. Job never fires — stale nextRunAtMs
4. Timeout — default 120s too short
5. Wrong channel — delivery.to misconfigured
6. Duplicate fires — schedule timezone issues
7. Silent failures — no delivery config at all
8. Session conflicts — concurrent job limits ...and 4 more with exact fixes.

Model Recommendation Matrix

| Task Type | Model | Why | |-----------|-------|-----| | Quick check | flash | Fast, cheap | | Analysis | sonnet | Needs reasoning | | Creative | opus | Quality matters | | Simple extraction | minimax | Cheapest |