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On a schedule

Turn your morning watch list into Asana tasks and a Slack summary

Anything on your watch list that needs action becomes an Asana task, and the team gets a short summary in Slack.

Runs
On a schedule
Apps
Asana, Slack
AI
Optional
Access
Asana write; chat:write

Send this to your assistant

Create a ClickRuntime automation: every morning, check my watch list for anything that needs action, create Asana tasks for those items, and post a summary in Slack.

Paste it into your assistant. It tells you what it will send or change before it runs live.

First time? Adding ClickRuntime to your assistant takes about two minutes.

Why use it

Why teams use this automation

A marketing lead keeps an eye on a handful of signals every week: competitor launches on Hacker News, new mentions of the product, keywords the team cares about. Checking each source by hand is the first thing to slip when the week gets busy. When a competitor announces a feature, the team hears about it from a customer a fortnight later.

This automation checks the watch list every morning, turns anything new into an Asana task and posts a short summary in Slack, so the team reacts to signals while they are still news.

What you get out of it

  • Signals turn into owned work

    A new mention or a competitor launch becomes an Asana task someone can pick up. It does not depend on a person reading a feed and remembering. Follow-up has an owner and a due date.

  • The whole team sees the same picture

    The Slack summary tells everyone what came in that morning. Product, sales and marketing hear about a competitor launch at the same time. Fewer "did you see this?" messages.

  • Only new items, once

    Each item is remembered after it is reported, so it never comes back the next day. The project and channel stay clean. Something only shows up when it is actually new.

  • Checks that never get skipped

    The check runs every morning, including during launches, holidays and busy weeks. Your view of the market does not depend on who had time. Gaps in coverage disappear.

  • A history of what you watched

    Tasks build into a log of competitor moves and mentions over time. That is useful for quarterly planning and positioning work. You can see trends instead of isolated news.

How it works

What happens, step by step

  1. Every morning, ClickRuntime checks each item on your watch list for new results.

  2. It remembers what it has already reported, so each item appears only once.

  3. AI picks out the items that need someone to act, if you turned that on.

  4. A task is created in your Asana project for each of those items.

  5. A short summary of everything new is posted in your Slack channel.

Before it runs live

  • Connect Asana
  • Connect Slack, then invite the app to the channel (type /invite @ClickRuntime there)

What you get

RunsOn a schedule
Turn your morning watch list into Asana tasks and a Slack summarytoday, 9:00Succeeded
Slack · #marketWatch list today: Acme Metrics launches self-serve dashboards (Hacker News), task created in Asana.

Build your own

Need it to work differently?

This template is a starting point. Copy the prompt and change it, or describe a different automation from scratch, with your own conditions, more apps or an AI step. Your assistant writes it, tests it and runs it on ClickRuntime.
  • Your own rules

    Conditions, thresholds, filters and exceptions, written the way you'd explain them to a colleague.

  • Any number of apps

    One automation can read from one app and update several others. Over 248 apps are ready, and anything with an API works too.

  • AI where it helps

    Summaries, classification, extraction and drafts use ClickRuntime's built-in AI, with no extra key.

  • On a schedule or on each event

    Runs as often as every 5 minutes, or the moment an app sends an event, and keeps track of what it already handled.

Changes you can ask for

  • Run it at a different time, more or less often, or only on weekdays
  • Change what the AI looks for, or how it writes the result
  • Add another app, for example also send it to Google Sheets
  • Combine it with other Asana and Slack steps into one automation

Under the hood

The code that runs this automation

This is the Python script that runs each time the automation starts. Your AI assistant writes it for you when you send the prompt, and you allow each step in your assistant. To change how the automation works, describe the change to your assistant and it updates the script for you. For every function it can use, see the script reference.
signals_to_asana_tasks_with_slack_alerts.pyexample
from clickruntime import on_trigger, credentials, http, state, notify, ai, report_fetched

WATCH = ["Northwind Analytics", "Acme Metrics"]
PROJECT_ID = "your-asana-project-id"

@on_trigger
def run(event):
    seen, new = state.get("seen") or [], []
    for term in WATCH:
        for h in http.get("https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search_by_date", params={"query": term, "tags": "story"}).json()["hits"]:
            if h["objectID"] not in seen:
                new.append((h["objectID"], term, h["title"], f"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id={h['objectID']}"))
    report_fetched(len(new))
    if not new:
        return {"new": 0}
    for oid, term, title, url in new:
        try:
            act = "yes" in ai.generate(f"We track '{term}'. Does this need action from our team? yes or no.\n{title}", max_output_tokens=3).text.lower()
        except ai.AIError:
            act = True
        if act:
            http.post("https://app.asana.com/api/1.0/tasks", headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {credentials.secret('ASANA_TOKEN')}"},
                      json={"data": {"name": f"{term}: {title}"[:200], "notes": url, "projects": [PROJECT_ID]}})
        seen.append(oid)
    notify.slack("Watch list today:\n" + "\n".join(f"- {t}: {title} {u}" for _, t, title, u in new), channel="#market")
    state.set("seen", seen[-2000:])
    return {"new": len(new)}

FAQ

Common questions

What can go on the watch list?
Anything with a public feed or search, such as Hacker News searches for competitor names, product mentions or keywords. Each entry is a search term or feed address.
Does every new item become a task?
Items that clearly need action become tasks, and the rest are only mentioned in the summary. You can set it to create a task for everything if you prefer.
Can it run weekly instead of daily?
Yes. Some teams prefer one summary on Monday morning. The schedule can be daily, weekly or any other regular time.
What permissions does it need?
Asana write; chat:write. Nothing else in your accounts is used.
Does it need AI?
No, but you can ask for an AI step (for example a summary). It then uses ClickRuntime's built-in AI allowance.
How many runs does it use?
One run each time it runs (on a schedule). Checks that find nothing to do and stop right away aren't counted.
Can I change how it works?
Yes. Describe the change to your AI assistant, for example a different schedule, channel or filter. It updates the automation, tests it and tells you what changed.

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