A useful automation needs an objective, a schedule, a delivery destination, and a stop condition. Writing “every morning” in a file does not itself prove a scheduled job exists.
Inspect actual scheduled work
openclaw cron listUse the cron reference to inspect runs and configure jobs. Heartbeats are periodic agent checks, not exact-time scheduling. Define time zones explicitly and verify the first real run and its delivery.
Bound failure
“Check once. If it fails, report the error and one recovery step, then stop this run. Do not send duplicates.”
Before retrying an external send, check whether it succeeded despite a timeout. Blind retries can duplicate messages, posts, or transactions. Track actual results and provider usage.
Stop the smallest affected scope
Use /stop in the active chat to interrupt its work. If a recurring job is responsible, inspect its ID and disable that job using the documented cron command. Stopping a chat does not disable future scheduled runs.
For an emergency affecting the whole Gateway, the host operator can run:
openclaw gateway stopThis interrupts Gateway service and channel handling; independently running processes may still need attention. After diagnosing the cause, start it again with openclaw gateway start and verify status. Do not make whole-system restarts the default response to one failed task.