What is a scheduled action?
A row in a database that says what to do and when, waiting for a worker to pick it up.
Scheduled action — A scheduled action is a unit of work stored with a due time and a payload — send step three, retry the webhook, run the digest — that a worker claims and executes when due. It is the mechanism behind cadences, reminders and agent runs.
Why it matters
Anything that has to happen later rather than right now, the third email in a cadence, a reminder three days out, a retry on a failed webhook, needs somewhere to wait until its time comes. A scheduled action is that waiting unit: a due time and the details of what to do, stored so a worker process can find it, claim it and run it once the time arrives.
The detail that determines whether this works reliably is deduplication. Two workers checking for due actions at the same moment could both find the same one and both run it, sending the same email twice or applying the same update twice. A correct system claims an action atomically, so only one worker ever executes it, and marks it done immediately so a retry of the check does not pick it up again. Cadences, reminders and agent runs all sit on top of the same mechanism: a queue of actions with a time attached, not separate systems built from scratch for each.
How a scheduled action runs
- 1
An action is stored
With a due time and the payload describing what to do.
- 2
A worker checks for due actions
On its own polling interval or triggered by a scheduler.
- 3
It claims the action
Atomically, so no other worker can also claim and run it.
- 4
It executes the payload
Sending the email, retrying the call, running the digest.
- 5
The action is marked done
So it is never claimed or run a second time.
The mistake to watch for
Questions
- How is a scheduled action different from a task?
- A task is usually a unit of work for a person to see and complete. A scheduled action is a unit of work a system executes automatically once its due time arrives, with no person clicking anything.
- What happens if a scheduled action fails to run?
- A well-built system retries it, often with a growing delay between attempts, and surfaces a persistent failure so a person can investigate rather than letting it silently vanish.
- Does every automated step in SalesCrew go through scheduled actions?
- Cadence steps, reminders and agent runs are all built on the same due-time mechanism, so the same claiming and logging rules protect all of them.