How to set custom Slack status timing.

Slack's built-in status timer only lets you pick a fixed duration — 30 minutes, an hour, today, "don't clear." There's no way to say "green Monday–Friday 9am–5pm in Eastern time" inside Slack itself. For custom timing — scheduled green hours, weekday-only presence, lunch-break dropouts — you need an external tool. Here's the full setup, and how it ties into keeping Slack active automatically.

What Slack's built-in status timer does

Slack's built-in status feature (the emoji + text combo, e.g. ":coffee: out for lunch") has a clear-after timer. You can choose:

• Don't clear
• 30 minutes
• 1 hour
• 4 hours
• Today
• This week
• A custom datetime

But notice what's missing: no recurring schedule. You can't say "set this status every weekday at 9am." And the presence dot (green vs hollow) isn't controlled by this menu at all — that's the 30-minute inactivity timer, which has no built-in scheduling.

What custom status timing really means

When people search for "custom Slack status timing" or "schedule Slack status," they usually want one of three things:

1. Custom green hours. Be active Mon–Fri 9–5, hollow outside those hours. Common for remote workers who want presence to match work hours.
2. Auto-set status messages. Have ":calendar: in meetings" show during your calendar blocks. Requires a separate calendar integration.
3. Lunch dropout. Active 9–12 and 1–5, away 12–1. Requires a tool with multiple schedule windows.

None of these are possible inside Slack itself. All three need an external tool that connects to your Slack session and modifies presence on a schedule.

Set up custom Slack status timing in 5 steps

1. Create an account at Stay Green On Slack. Free 14-day trial, no card required. Sign in with Google or email.
2. Install the Chrome extension. Visit the Stay Green Chrome extension, click Add to Chrome.
3. Open Slack in Chrome and click the extension icon. It reads your Slack session token automatically — no DevTools, no copy-pasting.
4. Open the Schedule tab. Pick days (e.g. Mon–Fri only), pick a start time (e.g. 09:00) and end time (e.g. 17:00), pick your IANA timezone (e.g. America/New_York). The tool stores everything in UTC under the hood but compares against your local timezone every minute.
5. Toggle Active. Your green dot will be on during the scheduled window and off outside it. Save isn't needed — changes auto-apply.

How the scheduling actually works

The cloud server polls every 60 seconds. For each user with an active schedule, it checks whether the current time (in the user's timezone) falls inside the schedule window and the current day of week is included. If yes, the server holds the Slack WebSocket connection open and pings active. If no, it drops the connection — Slack flips you to Away within 30 minutes.

That's exactly the model Slack itself uses — your green dot follows real session activity. The only difference is who runs the session: your laptop, or our server.

Common schedule patterns

• 9–5 weekdays — Mon–Fri, 09:00–17:00 in your timezone.
• Always on (24/7) — flip the "always on" toggle, no schedule needed.
• Split day (lunch dropout) — set two adjacent windows: 09:00–12:00 and 13:00–17:00. Currently Stay Green supports a single window per day; for split days, set the wider window and ignore the dropout, or request the feature.
• Variable per day — same start/end across selected days. Per-day variation is on the roadmap.

What if you want it always on?

Skip the schedule entirely. Toggle Always on in the dashboard and your status stays green 24/7. See app to keep Slack status green always active for that workflow.