Four standing agents. Eight scheduled runs a week. Nothing publishes without me.
Last revised July 2026
I run a small set of scheduled AI agents that do defined jobs on a defined cadence and hand me drafts. They do not act on my behalf. They do not send mail, publish posts, or contact anyone. They read, filter, draft, and stop.
The interesting part of this system is not what it does. It is what I took out of it.
An agent earns its slot by removing a decision I would otherwise have to make, or a search I would otherwise have to run. If it only produces output I never act on, it is not automation. It is noise with a schedule attached.
Sweeps one inbox across three tracks at once: roles, teaching openings, and consulting or referral signals. Filters postings against a hard test for level, function, and location, caps the list at five so it cannot pad itself, and separately flags threads going cold, where I owe someone a reply or someone owes me one.
Output: one email. Who needs a reply today, what is going cold, up to five things worth a look. On a quiet day it says so in two lines and stops.
One idea per week, drafted once, adapted across channels. It does not work from a theme rotation. It looks at what actually happened in the last seven days and builds from a real specific, alternating between a professional audience and the families and referral partners my estate services business serves.
Output: one long piece for the site, a compressed version for LinkedIn, and a short social adaptation only where it fits. One idea, not one piece per channel.
Checks whether there is an estate sale on the board in the next fourteen days. If there is, it drafts the full weekend promotion sequence. If not, it reports the last sale date and any unanswered inquiry, and stops. On the first run of each month it appends a short audit of what a customer would actually encounter: search visibility, unanswered reviews, anything broken that would cost a lead.
Output: a full campaign when there is something to promote, a two-line note when there is not, plus one monthly check folded into the same email.
The doctorate is the thing most likely to get displaced by work that feels more urgent, so it gets the only agent whose job is protection rather than production. It surfaces committee mail and deadlines, then asks the same three questions every week: what moved, what is blocking the next step, and what the one real work session before next Sunday will be.
Output: under fifteen lines. No research, no drafting, no encouragement. The value is the standing question.
The distinction that keeps this small is between a scheduled agent and a capability. A scheduled agent is for work that has to happen on a cadence whether or not I remember it. A capability is something I invoke when I need it, and it costs nothing the rest of the time.
Client research before a walkthrough, proposal drafting, settlement reporting, contract review, CRM cleanup, literature work on the dissertation. All of these are real and all of them run on AI. None of them are on a schedule, because none of them need to fire while I am asleep. Confusing capability with cadence is how four good ideas become thirty-seven runs a week.
Before anything goes on a schedule: would this be worse if I only ran it when I thought of it? If the honest answer is no, it is a capability, not an agent.
I built sixteen of these. At peak they ran roughly thirty-seven times a week. Some of it was genuinely useful. A lot of it was me automating my own anxiety.
Scheduled runs per week at peak, across 13 recurring agents
Scheduled runs per week now, across 4 agents
Reduction in scheduled compute, with no loss of anything I was acting on
The audit was simple. For each agent I asked one question: in the last month, what did I actually do differently because this ran? Where the honest answer was nothing, it went.
Anyone can stand up sixteen agents. The discipline that matters, and the one most organizations skip, is measuring what came back and being willing to turn off the things that did not earn their place. Adoption is not the hard part. Restraint is.
Paul Tonden · paul@houseofpraxis.studio · linkedin.com/in/paultonden