The work that happens while you’re away
The job
Routine work used to queue behind my presence. Recurring reports and checks waited for my machine to be open, and a long job died when the laptop closed. Now the routines run on a schedule in the cloud, longer jobs keep going after I leave the desk, and I check in from my phone.
The systems involved
A scheduler in the cloud, running the assistant without my machine. The systems it reaches are the ones it already works in on an ordinary day: the project system, where the Monday queue proposal is waiting before I sit down, and the affiliate data at Feed Engine Group, where the trend read across programmes runs on its own clock. Nothing gets new credentials because I am away.
How it works
Work suits the schedule when it can be specified before it runs and lands as something reviewable: a report, a draft, a proposal, a diff. Nothing is scheduled that has not first been run attended and read closely; the first pass is done by hand, the schedule gets the second. Every unattended job produces an artefact and stops. Sending and publishing stay with me. The phone is for reading and answering: a job that hits a question parks itself and asks, and the answer resumes it. Jobs that need judgment partway through do not suit this, and neither does anything irreversible. Client systems get attended work only.
Where this goes wrong
The risk is in the reading. Output that arrives on a schedule arrives looking finished, and finished is persuasive: a report built on a stale input reads exactly as smoothly as one built on a fresh one. The guard is that every scheduled job opens by declaring its inputs and when they were last updated, and a report that cannot show its sources does not get read. The boundary underneath is worth stating plainly. The throughput ceiling moved; the accountable person did not.
When it’s a poor fit
The fit is poor when output would reach anyone external without a person between the job and the send; nothing unattended owns a send button. It is poor when the job needs credentials you would not leave with a contractor working alone, which for me means every client production system. And it is poor when the work has never once been done attended.
My experience
I take the unattended hours gladly, but I read everything they produce before I call it finished, because it arrives looking finished either way.