Sleeps / Delays in flows

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

Overview

This feature pauses flow execution inside itself. Alternative approaches for similar needs include:

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

Each step can pause after execution for a specified duration in seconds, though the input can actually handle several hours, days, or months.

Note

Sleeping is passive and does not consume any resources.

Use cases

Common applications include:

• Customer relations: Delay welcome emails by one day after signup to prevent information overload.
• Support ticketing: Wait 30 minutes after ticket submission to allow self-resolution before escalation.
• Cybersecurity: Impose a 5-minute delay before alerting the security team after threat detection, filtering false positives.
• Content moderation: Pause user-submitted content release for hours to allow review and adjustments.

How to implement

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

1. Go to Advanced.
2. Click on Sleep.
3. Set the pause duration.
4. Toggle on.

A bed icon indicates the sleep step is activated.

Monitoring slept steps

The Runs menu dashboard displays:

• Current flow state.
• Already executed steps.
• Incoming steps.

This allows you to monitor all past, current, and future runs while a flow is paused.