Schedule the Workflow with Automations

11.1 What an automation is

An automation on Zo is a scheduled job: a prompt that runs on its own cadence — daily, weekly, monthly — with the result delivered to you by email, by Telegram, or just saved to your workspace. You write it once. It runs forever, until you turn it off.

For investment work, this is the difference between a workflow you actually keep up with and one you abandon after a busy month. The regime read, the weekly monitor, and the news scan are exactly the kind of recurring chores a person skips when life gets in the way. Automations remove the “will I remember on Sunday?” from the loop.

11.2 What to automate

Not everything should run on a schedule. The right test is: does this task produce a useful answer when nothing has happened? If yes, automate it. If no, leave it manual.

• Worth automating. Weekly regime check, weekly thesis monitor, weekly news scan over open positions and watchlist, monthly value screener run.
• Leave manual. Writing a new thesis, sizing a new position, the quarterly Living Letter. These need your hands on them.

11.3 The weekly thesis monitor automation

The single highest-leverage automation. Every Monday morning, the Portfolio Manager persona re-scores every open thesis and emails you the four-bucket action list.

Two details worth noting. First, the automation re-uses the same persona and skill you would invoke in a live conversation — nothing about the analysis changes because it is running on a schedule. Second, the result is delivered to you. You still read it, you still decide. The automation does the bookkeeping, not the judgement.

11.4 The weekly news brief

The second automation worth setting up. Every Friday afternoon, scan the news for anything material about your open positions and your watchlist names. Summarize in three lines per name.

11.5 The monthly screener run

Schedule the value screener to run once a month on the S&P 500. Diff the watchlist against last month’s — new names appearing on the list are the most interesting output, because something changed in the last 30 days that put them there.

11.6 What not to automate

Three workflows stay on your hands.

• Writing a new thesis. A thesis is a deliberate act of writing things down. Automating it would defeat the purpose. The system can prepare the materials, but you write the verdict.
• Sizing a position. Sizing involves looking across the rest of the portfolio at the moment of the trade — existing exposures, the regime, recent moves. That judgement belongs in a live conversation, not on a schedule.
• The quarterly Living Letter. The letter is a forcing function: a person sits down, reads the journal, and writes honestly. Automating it would turn it into a status report. You can use the LP Voice persona to draft it — but the decision to publish should be a deliberate human one.

11.7 Where the audit trail lives

Every automation writes its output to your workspace before delivering it to your inbox. If an email gets lost, the file is in ~/clarion/automations/. If you want to know what the monitor said three months ago, the file is there. The journal does not depend on email retention.

Key takeaways

• Automations on Zo turn a recurring prompt into a scheduled job with a delivery target. Write it once, it runs forever.
• Automate the chores: weekly thesis monitor, weekly news brief, monthly screener.
• Leave the judgement calls manual: new theses, sizing, the quarterly Living Letter.
• Every automated output also lands in ~/clarion/ as a file you can re-read months later.
• If you start ignoring an automation’s output, narrow it or turn it off. An unread email is worse than no email.