# Standing orders for a scheduled Grok Bot (free sample)

A free sample from Grok Bot Templates: personas, standing orders and handoffs, by PaperChaseWebb. Written for Grok Bot.

A bot that runs on a schedule is only as good as the order it reads at the start of each run. Loose orders give you messages at odd hours, reports nobody reads and watches that never stop. This sample gives you the card we use for every scheduled job, a cron cheat sheet in local time, and the two reporting rules that cut most of the noise.

## The standing order card

Paste this into the bot's instructions or a file it reads at the start of every run.

```text
STANDING ORDER: [short name]
OWNER: [bot name]
SCHEDULE: [cron line] in [time zone], [exact or flexible within N minutes]
WINDOW: run [any time / hours]; report [weekdays 07:00 to 19:00 local]
EXPIRES: [date, or the condition that ends it]
JOB: [one sentence]
STEPS: 1. [...] 2. [...] 3. [...]
DONE WHEN: [the check that proves the run worked]
REPORT: [every run / end of day / only if] to [who]
REPORT ONLY IF: [conditions worth a message]
NEVER: send, post, spend, trade, deploy or delete without my yes for that one action.
```

## Cron in local time

| You want | Cron line |
|---|---|
| Weekdays at 7:30 AM | `30 7 * * 1-5` |
| Hourly, 7 AM to 7 PM, weekdays | `0 7-19 * * 1-5` |
| Every 30 minutes, working hours | `*/30 7-18 * * 1-5` |
| Mondays at 9 AM | `0 9 * * 1` |

Write the zone next to the line ("America/Chicago", not "my time"). If the platform runs cron in UTC, convert once and recheck when daylight saving time changes.

## Rule 1: quiet by default

Monitors and watches report only when the condition is met or the check fails. Digests send one line when there is nothing. Failures are reported once, not every run.

## Rule 2: report at the end of the day

```text
Each run, append one line to [run log]: time, job, result, flags.
At 18:30 [zone] on weekdays, send DONE / BLOCKED / DECIDE from the day's lines.
Interrupt me earlier only if money is about to be spent, a deadline is under 2 hours away, or a send or deploy is waiting on me.
```

The full pack adds 8 ready-to-paste personas (chief of staff, research and verification, SEO auditor, product builder, expense and receipts, social signal watcher, newsletter drafter, inbox drafter), event routine recipes, multi-bot handoffs with a decision log and four approval gates, memory hygiene rules, a 20-point check with 10 test scenarios, and 12 prompts.