Sleeps / Delays in flows

Any step can pause the flow for a set amount of time before the next one runs.

Overview

Sleep pauses the flow in place, after a given step. A few related mechanisms exist for similar needs:

• Schedule the trigger of a script or flow, rather than pausing an already-running one.
• Suspend a flow until an approval step is resolved.
• Retry a step until it succeeds.
• Early stop/Break the flow when a step’s result matches a predicate.

The pause duration is set in seconds but accepts values spanning hours, days, or months.

Note

A sleeping step holds no worker and consumes no compute — it’s purely a scheduled delay.

Use cases

Some common reasons to add a sleep step:

• Customer relations: hold a welcome email for a day after signup so it doesn’t arrive alongside a flood of other onboarding messages.
• Support ticketing: wait 30 minutes after a ticket comes in before escalating, giving the customer a chance to resolve it themselves.
• Security alerting: delay a threat notification by 5 minutes to filter out signals that turn out to be false positives.
• Content moderation: hold user-submitted content for a review window before it’s published.

How to implement

On the step after which the flow should pause:

1. Go to Advanced.
2. Open Sleep.
3. Set the duration.
4. Toggle it on.

A bed icon on the step marks that sleep is active.

Monitoring slept steps

The Runs dashboard shows:

• The flow’s current state.
• Which steps have already run.
• Which steps are still ahead.

That’s enough to track a paused run — past, present, and upcoming steps — while it’s sitting in a sleep.