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Sleeps / Delays in Flows

Executions within a flow can be suspended for a given time.


tip

This feature is made to hold a flow inside of it. Based on your specific needs, you may want to utilize other features:

Each step of a flow can be paused after execution of a given amount of seconds. Although in seconds, this input can in fact handle several hours, days, months (years). Sleeping is passive and does not consume any resources.

From a single flow, this feature can for example help you with:

  • Customer relations: after each user signs up, hold off for one day before dispatching a welcome email to prevent information overload.
  • Support ticketing: when a user submits a ticket, introduce a 30-minute wait to give an opportunity for potential self-resolution prior to escalating to the support team.
  • Cybersecurity: after an automated system identifies a possible threat, impose a 5-minute delay before alerting the security team, providing a window to filter out false positives.
  • Content moderation: pause the release of user-submitted content for several hours, offering a chance for review and necessary adjustments.

And many more use cases.

How to do it​

Within a flow, pick the step after which you want to suspend:

  • go to Advanced
  • click on Sleep
  • set the duration of the pause
  • toggle on

The bed icon will show the sleep step is activated.

Sleep activation

Keep control of slept steps​

The Runs menu provides a dashboard to monitor all past, current and future runs. While a flow is executed and paused, you can see in a single view:

  • the current state of the flow
  • the steps that were already executed
  • the incoming ones

Sleep step from runs menu