Make (formerly Integromat) is a brilliant tool for automating and scheduling workflows. I’m going to show you how you can schedule a scenario to run a every 2 weeks; an option that isn’t available on the app at a glance.
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What is a scenario?
A scenario is Make’s name for a group of actions that get triggered. The can be run manually, triggered by an action or scheduled to run at a certain time. There are a crazy amount of modules to choose from, connecting one web app to another.
How to schedule a scenario
Make have a pretty extensive scheduling option at the start of each scenario. Think of it as a recurring task that you’re asking it to do. You have to click on the clock button and then choose the days, times or minute intervals you’d like your scenario to run.
How to schedule every 2 weeks
Make doesn’t have an option to run your scenario every 2 weeks. I’m going to show you how to do it in a few easy steps. For this example, I want to send an automated Slack message, reminding everyone there’s a meeting that day, every 2 weeks. Here are the 6 easy steps.
- As your very first module, create an increment function using the built-in tools options at the bottom. This function starts at zero and adds 1 to the previous number every time the scenario is run. Make sure to choose to never reset the value.
- We’re going to run our scenario every week at a certain time. Our meeting is on a Wednesday every 2 weeks so I’m going to choose to remind people on a Wednesday at 9 am.
- Next we need to add a router module. You can find this in the tools at the bottom again. You’ll see it automatically has two arms coming off of it. This is going to let us send a Slack message one week and do nothing the next week.
- Now it’s time to set up our filters that determine which arm of the router our flow will go down. If the increment number set at the start is odd, we’ll do nothing. If it’s even, we’ll send a Slack message. This is how we send a message every 2 weeks.
- Click the filter button and give it a label of odd. In the condition, we’re going to use our i variable. This is the number that gets set by the increment function. mod can be found under the maths functions where my cursor is in the image. Then type the number 2 so we end up with i mod 2.
- Make sure to set your Equal to option as a Numeric equal to, not a text equal to.
- Finally set it to be equal to 1. The mod function gives us the remainder after dividing i by 2. So if we have a remainder of 1, i must be an odd number.
- Now we do the same for our even filter but set i mod 2 to be equal to 0. This means it’s an even number and is when we want to send our Slack message.
- Finally, add the modules that you want to run. For me, it’s sending a Slack message on the even weeks. For the odd weeks, I just set a variable to log that it’s an odd week.
You could use this to send any form of communication every 2 weeks or even run a piece of code every 2 weeks. If if you change the mod function or the original schedule, you could run it on a completely different schedule. It opens up the scheduling functionality of Make even more.
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