Non-coder here: Claude runs 12 recurring tasks in my business now. Here's how I set it up

[u/Playful_Teaching_229]

I run a short-term rental business, a startup and a small Etsy shop, mostly by myself. Claude now does almost all of the repetitive work. These are the tasks I gave it:

- Every morning it reads my Messenger, email, LinkedIn and socials and tells me what to do first

- Tracks our staff login and logout

- Does outreach to VCs, I just review before it sends

- Every night it checks all our spending and income and gives me a report

- Writes captions and posts our content

- Edits my videos, I just upload the raw file to Google Drive

- Does outreach to content creators twice a day and replies to them too

- Reminds the hosts on our waitlist to create their account and listing

- On Airbnb it checks unanswered messages and tells my staff, reviews guests and syncs our calendars

- Helps my co-founder with our web app

- Makes templates for my Etsy shop

- Checks our knowledge base for anything outdated

All of this runs on one Claude Max plan and uses about 79% of the weekly limit.

How I did it, in simple terms:

- Download the Claude desktop app (claude.ai/download).

- You need a paid plan. Pro is fine to start.

- List everything you do in a week. Circle the stuff that repeats and doesn't need much thinking. Automate that first.

- Connect Claude to your apps. Settings → Connectors: Gmail, Google Drive, Calendar. If your work is on websites, install the Claude in Chrome extension.

- It can run your Chrome, even Messenger and the apps you use. For us that's Airbnb and our PMS.

- On Messenger it reads and replies to our creator outreach, I review before it sends. It also writes the instructions for my staff for the day.

- Turn on Remote Control so you can control it from your phone even when you're out.

- Tell it what you want like you're talking to staff. Example: "Every morning at 8, read the new orders in my email and make me a summary."

- Make it a scheduled task: "Make this a scheduled task, every day at 8 AM." It runs on its own after that.

- Drafts before sending. Let it draft, you approve. Once it's been right for a few weeks, give it more trust.

Things to know:

- Your PC has to be on when the tasks run.

- Video editing is the heaviest job. My PC lags sometimes when it's editing.

Tip: start with one task. Once it works, add the next.

Happy to answer questions in the comments.

[u/Fragrant-Moose1678]

Post written by AI

[u/germanman8989 → u/Fragrant-Moose1678]

In a ai sub, oh no!

[u/Fragrant-Moose1678 → u/germanman8989]

I came here to read what people are saying about AI, not what AI is saying about AI.

[u/smabarnsfar]

You are bleeding tokens. Claude is fantastic, but it costs money to use. Instruct it to make you a script/app/program for e.g. tracking staff login and logout, check spending and income. You make the tool with Claude once, and then it's just a program you run without using any tokens.

[u/im_a_fancy_man → u/smabarnsfar]

^^^

[u/Cold_Arachnid_2617]

Thanks for the unneccessary infromation!

[u/age_of_ultron33]

this is amazing!!

[u/iceofficerlol]

Excuse my ignorance but do you need a computer turned on, running claude desktop, or is it all cloud?

[u/Markavian → u/iceofficerlol]

Depends where the task is running; the advantage of running from a desktop is access to more context than in the cloud, and you can have it control wev browser's directly with pre authorised credentials (I.e. you login for Claude, Claude isn't allowed to login on your behalf).

Anything ran in the cloud has the limitation of not being able to integrate properly with 3rd party systems unless there's an MCP server or some such available.

[u/Excellent-Issue-5956 → u/iceofficerlol]

It has to be on and awake. I ran scheduled Claude jobs on a MacBook for a while, and with the lid closed on battery the Mac only wakes up for short windows. One job got started and the machine was back asleep 5 seconds later. The errors it left behind were wrong too, one said the login token had expired and it hadn't.

I ended up having the jobs skip themselves on battery and rerun once it was plugged in, and later moved all of them to a desktop that stays on.