> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.automate.it.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
# Automations & schedule
> Standing briefs that draft new content on a schedule
An **automation** is a task brief that runs on a schedule. *"Every Monday at 9am, draft a thread recapping last week's product changes"* — the automation spawns a fresh task each cycle, the draft lands in review, and you approve it like anything else. Recurring content, same human gate.
## Schedules
An automation runs on a cron-style schedule or manually on demand. You don't need to know cron — describe the rhythm in plain English when creating one and Automate It parses it. You can also cap total runs (useful for a limited campaign) or hit **Run now** at any time; if a run is already in flight, running again is safely refused.
## Lead time
Drafts are created **ahead of** their scheduled publish time — by default 24 hours, configurable per automation. That's your review window: content for Monday 9am is sitting in the queue Sunday morning, not racing you at 8:59.
## The Schedule calendar
The **Schedule** tab is a calendar of everything queued to go out — tasks from automations and one-off scheduled tasks alike. It's the answer to "what's publishing this week?"
## Requires review
Automations default to requiring review, and that's the right setting for almost everything. Turning it off means spawned tasks publish without a human looking at them — reserve it for genuinely mechanical output.
Deleting an automation also deletes the tasks it created. Pause by editing the schedule instead if you want to keep the history.