> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.mergent.co/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# How Schedules Work

> An overview of Mergent Schedules

In Mergent, work that recurs at regular intervals is represented by a
**schedule**. These intervals are defined by a **cron** or **rrule**.

When a schedule is triggered, it creates a task. This task then initiates a
request to your application, just like a standalone task. It's important to note
that tasks created by schedules function identically to individually created
tasks.

Because schedules occur at regular intervals, they are most often created using
Mergent's dashboard. Applications that require additional control — for example,
when creating schedules dynamically per-user — can create schedules using
Mergent's client libraries (like
[mergent-js](https://github.com/mergentlabs/mergent-js)) or the API.

**Example**: Let's say you have a news aggregation site and you want to send a
digest of top news articles to your users every morning at 8 AM.

In this scenario, you would create a schedule in Mergent using a cron expression
to represent the "every day at 8 AM" interval. When the schedule triggers, it
creates a task to generate and send the digest email.

<CardGroup>
  <Snippet file="cards/get_started.mdx" />

  <Snippet file="cards/how_tasks_work.mdx" />

  <Snippet file="cards/tasks_and_schedules.mdx" />

  <Snippet file="cards/schedules_cron_rrule_syntax.mdx" />
</CardGroup>