Manual Duties

A manual duty has no recurring schedule at all — it sits ready and only runs when something explicitly starts it: Run now, a webhook, an email trigger, or a hand-off from another specialist.

Why use a manual duty

Not every job needs a clock. Some work only makes sense in response to something — a request from a teammate, a document that needs processing right now, or a step that only happens after another specialist finishes its part. A manual duty holds the instructions and specialist assignment ready to go, without spending a scheduled run slot on work that has no natural cadence.

Ways to start a manual duty

• Run now — trigger it yourself from the duty's card whenever you need the work done.
• Webhook — every duty, manual or scheduled, has its own secret webhook URL; see webhooks.
• Email trigger — a matching email can start a manual duty the same way it starts a scheduled one; see email triggers.
• Hand-off from another specialist — when one specialist's step finishes cleanly, it can hand off to the next, starting a manual duty on a different specialist as part of a chained sequence.

Good for on-demand work

Manual duties suit anything that's genuinely on-demand rather than recurring: a one-off report you'll ask for by name, a cleanup job you only need after a specific event, or the second step of a workflow that should only ever run right after the first step succeeds. Because it still counts as a duty, it keeps its own instructions, autonomy setting, and delivery destination — it simply never fires on its own clock.

Setting up a manual duty

Create it the same way you create any duty, then leave the schedule blank instead of picking a time. Everything else works normally: choose the specialist, write the instructions, set the autonomy level, and choose where results are delivered. The only difference is that nothing starts the run for you.

Examples

• A "close out the week" duty a specialist only runs when you tell it to, rather than every Friday whether there's anything to close out or not.
• A document-processing duty that a webhook starts the instant a file lands in a shared folder from another system.
• A second-stage duty that only makes sense after a first specialist's research step reports a clean result, started by that hand-off rather than a clock.