HOW TO AUTOMATE YOUR LIFE (full course):

“Delegation is buying back your highest value hours with someone else's lower cost ones. Automation is building back your highest value hours with a machine's lower cost ones.” - Alex Hormozi welcome to the complete guide to claude routines. who this is for: anyone. whether you've never written a line of code in your life, or you're a developer who just wants to know what claude routines can actually do... this guide takes you from zero to running personalised automations. no server required. no workflow builder required. no degree required. table of contents what are claude routines? how routines actually think and work the three ways to trigger a routine step-by-step setup guide writing prompts that don't fail the skills architecture: your secret weapon use case library: ideas by persona building compounding memory connectors and integrations debugging when runs fail security and permissions limits, quotas and planning the discovery framework: let claude design your routines 1. what are claude routines? the simple version write a task. hand it to claude. it runs itself every day on its own server, without your laptop open, without you paying for hosting, without you checking in. that's it. that's the whole pitch. the problem they solve before routines existed, automating an AI-powered task meant choosing between bad options: routines eliminate every single one of those constraints. runs on anthropic's cloud. included with your subscription. brings full claude intelligence to every automated run. claude routines can reason through problems. it notices when something is missing. it tries alternative approaches. it catches its own mistakes. it decides what to do next. this is the difference between a robot that follows a script and an agent that actually thinks. 2. how routines actually think and work the execution cycle this is the most important thing to understand before you set anything up. every single run follows this cycle: every run is stateless. the container starts from zero and ends at zero. the only things that survive a run are what claude writes back to your github repo, or sends via a connector like slack or email. what this means for you the good news: no server to maintain no environment drift over time runs are clean and reproducible you never pay for idle compute the things to design around: any "memory" between runs must be stored in the github repo local files on your computer don't exist from the routine's perspective API keys must be passed as environment variables, not as .env files (those are git-ignored and never get cloned) the agentic capability inside each run during a run, claude has its full intelligence: workflows: step-by-step processes it can execute agents: sub-tasks it can delegate to itself tools: actions it can take (read a file, call an API, write output, use connectors) one routine can fetch data from five different APIs, compare the results, make a decision, write a report, and post a summary to slack. all in one run. no human in the loop. the autonomy trade-off routines run fully autonomous, acting as you, with no ability to pause and ask for permission. this is intentional. a routine that stops and waits for your input is no better than doing it yourself. the implication: your prompt must be complete and unambiguous. claude cannot ask you to clarify. vague instructions get vague results. this is why section 5 on prompt writing is the most important section in this guide. 3. the three ways to trigger a routine you can stack multiple trigger types on a single routine. most people start with schedules, then add API triggers as they get more advanced. trigger 1: schedules set a routine to run at regular intervals using plain english or cron syntax. examples: every weekday at 7:00 am every monday at 9:00 am every day at midnight 0 9 * * 1-5 (cron syntax for weekdays at 9 am) the key constraint: minimum interval is one hour. you can't run a routine every 5 minutes. best for: daily digests, weekly reports, morning briefings, recurring data pulls, scheduled content generation. one thing most people miss: anthropic's infrastructure runs in UTC by default. if you want your report ready at 7 am london time, account for that when setting the schedule. trigger 2: API calls every routine automatically generates a dedicated HTTP endpoint and a bearer token. any external system can trigger your routine by sending a POST request to that URL. what this unlocks: a new sale in your CRM triggers a routine that drafts a personalised onboarding email a deployment completes, triggering a routine that writes release notes a form submission triggers a routine that researches and drafts a response a webhook from stripe, shopify, typeform... whatever you use, it fires your routine passing context: you can include a text payload in the POST request. claude appends it to the prompt as additional context, so you can send dynamic information (customer name, order details, a question)