> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.wednesdayai.dev/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Background tasks

> Ask your AI to do things later — reminders, recurring reports, and long-running jobs that keep going even if the service restarts.

# Background tasks

You can ask your AI to do things **later** instead of right now: remind you in two hours, send a summary every morning, or hand a long job to the background and report back. These are background tasks — jobs the AI runs without you having to keep the chat open.

Background tasks are reliable by design:

* **They survive restarts.** If the service your AI runs on restarts mid-job, the job is picked up and finished, not thrown away.
* **They retry themselves.** A job that fails halfway (a flaky network, a busy service) is tried again automatically.
* **They run quietly.** Recurring jobs normally send you just a short summary, or nothing at all if there is nothing to say.

## What you can ask for

* **One-off reminders** — "Remind me in 20 minutes to check the oven", "Remind me at 4pm to call the bank."
* **Recurring jobs** — "Every weekday at 9am, summarise overnight emails", "Every Monday, draft a weekly plan."
* **Background work** — "Work on this research in the background and tell me when it's done."

See [Reminders and schedules](/users/cron) for concrete phrasings and where results get delivered.

## Ask for a reminder

<Steps>
  <Step title="Send the request in chat">
    Ask naturally: "Remind me in two hours to follow up on the build." You can also name a clock time ("at 4pm") or a timezone ("at 9am London time").

    **What you should see:** the AI confirms the reminder is set, usually repeating the time back to you.
  </Step>

  <Step title="Wait for it to fire">
    At the time you asked for, the AI starts a fresh job and carries it out.

    **What you should see:** the reminder (or its result) arrives in the chat where you asked for it — or in the place you agreed on ("send the summary to the team channel").
  </Step>

  <Step title="Change or cancel it">
    Reply in chat: "Actually, move that reminder to 5pm" or "Cancel the morning summary." One-off reminders tidy themselves away after they fire, so there is nothing to clean up.

    **What you should see:** the AI confirms the change or cancellation.
  </Step>
</Steps>

<Tip>
  Be specific about **when** and **where**: "Every weekday at 9am, summarise my inbox and send it here." Vague timing ("sometime tomorrow morning") works less reliably than an exact time.
</Tip>

## What happens if things go wrong

Background jobs are retried automatically when they fail. A job is only parked permanently when it has used up its retries or has been stuck for roughly 25 minutes — that is rare and usually means whatever the job depends on (a website, a service, a file) was down for a long time.

If a job you expected never finished:

1. Wait a few minutes — the retry happens quietly in the background.
2. Ask the AI in chat: "Did the morning summary run today?"
3. If it still has not appeared, ask whoever runs your AI to check the task history — they have a screen for exactly that, and your report helps them find the stuck job.

<Note>
  If the service your AI runs on was restarted or updated while a job was in progress, the job resumes automatically. Reminders and schedules you set up before an update keep working — you do not need to recreate them.
</Note>

## Related

* [Reminders and schedules](/users/cron) — phrasings, delivery options, and how schedules differ from the AI's regular check-ins
* [Troubleshooting](/users/troubleshooting) — what to do when your AI is not responding at all