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Put your recurring research on autopilot

An Action is a saved prompt that Chief runs for you automatically — on a schedule, when new data lands in a Project, or through a guided calendar-meeting workflow. Instead of opening a task every Monday to ask the same question, you set the question up once and let Chief deliver the answer to your inbox or to your Library. Think of an Action as a standing instruction: “every Monday at 8 AM, summarize last week’s support tickets and email me the highlights.” Chief runs the prompt against your Project’s files, writes the result, and sends it — without you lifting a finger.

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A concrete example

Say your team drops new customer-call transcripts into a Project all week. You create an Action with the prompt “Summarize this week’s new call transcripts into the top 5 themes and any churn risks.” You set it to run every Friday at 4 PM, turn on Send email when action completes, and add your team as recipients. Every Friday afternoon, a fresh summary lands in everyone’s inbox — built only from the files that are actually in the Project.

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How an Action works

  • Prompt — what you want Chief to do, written exactly like a normal task message (you can mention specific Files, Labels, and Concepts).
  • Trigger — when it runs: On a schedule, Whenever there is new source data, or New calendar meeting through the guided Google Calendar-to-Notion workflow.
  • Scope — which files power the run. By default it uses all files in the Project; you can narrow it.
  • Output — where the result goes: emailed to recipients, saved to your Library with a Label, or both.
ℹ️ Good to know: Actions live inside a Project. Open a Project, then choose Actions in the top navigation to see, create, and manage them. You will not find an Actions tab outside of a Project.
Actions are not browser-only. The Actions API creates the same scheduled and new-data Actions from your own code, and chief actions create does it from a shell — the runs still happen on Chief’s side either way.

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What Actions are good for

  • Weekly or monthly reports built from a growing set of files.
  • Alerts that fire only when new source data is added.
  • Digests delivered to a whole team by email.
  • A running archive of results saved to your Library for later comparison.
This is what makes Chief proactive rather than reactive — the intelligence arrives without you asking for it.

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FAQ

Yes. A task is a one-time conversation. An Action saves a prompt and re-runs it automatically on your chosen trigger, delivering the result each time.
A scheduled Action can produce an empty or skipped run if the files it depends on are missing — for example, if a File you mentioned in the prompt was deleted, or no new source data arrived for a new-data trigger. It can also fail if your workspace is out of credits. Check the run history to see what happened.
Inside a Project, in the top navigation. The Actions tab only appears within a Project, not on your home screen.