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:
- Schedule the trigger of a script or flow.
- Suspend a flow until a step is approved.
- Retry a step multiple times until it is successful.
- Early stop/Break the flow if a step met a predicate expression.
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.
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