Scheduled AI tasks on Windows

A task with a time attached is easy to promise and harder to keep. This page is about the parts that decide whether it actually runs — sleep, overlap, and where the work happens.

Last checked 2026-09-19

Three jobs worth scheduling

• A morning digest. "Read the files added to this folder since yesterday and give me five lines."
• A weekly report. "Turn this week's spreadsheet into the same summary as last week, and flag anything that moved more than 10%."
• A nightly tidy. "File anything new in Downloads by type, leave shortcuts alone."

Each is one sentence, and each is the kind of thing nobody does by hand twice.

Why Task Scheduler plus a script is not quite it

Windows Task Scheduler runs programs. An AI job needs three things it does not provide: a signed-in account to run under, somewhere for the answer to go, and a record of what was done that you can read afterwards. You can build all three around a script. Most people build the first, skip the other two, and find out weeks later that the task has been failing silently.

What decides whether a scheduled agent actually runs

These are the rules in Eleos, and they are worth knowing whatever you use, because everything in this space has a version of them:

• The check runs every 30 seconds while the app is running, so a task set for 09:00 fires within about half a minute of it.
• A missed time is not run late by default. If the PC was asleep at 09:00 and wakes at 23:00, the morning digest is marked missed rather than run at midnight, unless it is still within a five-minute grace window. A report of yesterday delivered tonight is worse than no report.
• A task will not overlap itself. If the last run is still going, the new one is skipped and recorded as overlapped, not as missed — the difference matters when you read the history.
• An occurrence from before the task existed is not a missed run. Creating a 09:00 task at 14:00 does not immediately fire it.
• Each run files its own chat, named after the task and the date, which is where the answer and everything it did are kept.

Where the work happens, and why it matters

Anthropic's own scheduled tasks in Cowork run remotely by default — their help centre says they "run on their cadence even when your computer is asleep or the Claude Desktop app is closed" — but also that "if a scheduled task requires local files or apps, it will only run locally" (source, checked 19 September 2026). Their Claude Code desktop routines say the same thing more bluntly: a local task "only fires while the app is open and your computer is awake" (source).

Eleos schedules only local tasks, because the work is on your machine by design. The trade is plain: nothing runs while the PC is off, and nothing leaves the PC either.

Practical setting: if a task matters, stop the machine sleeping through it. On Windows, Settings → System → Power, screen off is fine, sleep is not. On a laptop, check what closing the lid does as well: it sleeps by default.

Doing it with a local model

A scheduled job is exactly where a model on your own PC earns its place: it runs while you are away, on files you may not want uploaded, nobody is waiting on the speed, and it spends none of an AI subscription. See local AI on Windows.

Questions

What happens if the PC is asleep at the scheduled time?

The run is skipped and recorded as missed. Eleos does not silently run yesterday's job tonight.

Can two tasks run at once?

A task will not run while it is still running from last time. Different tasks can overlap.

Where does the result go?

Into a new chat named after the task and the date, with the whole run inside it, so you can read what was done rather than trusting that it happened.

Can I be told when it finishes?

Yes — a notification when a run ends, and the chat opens where it left off.

Where to go next

• "Sort my Desktop into folders." What actually happened
• Local AI on Windows, offline and on your own machine
• A Claude Desktop alternative for Windows