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. 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.
• Different hours per day — turn on "Different times per day" in the dashboard and set a separate start/end for each selected day, e.g. a shorter Friday or a later Monday start.
• Night shift (overnight) — set an end time earlier than the start time, e.g. 22:00–06:00, and the window runs through midnight into the next morning. The 🌙 Night Shift preset sets this for you in one click.
• Split day (lunch dropout) — set two adjacent windows: 09:00–12:00 and 13:00–17:00. Stay Green currently supports one continuous window per day (which can now vary per day), so for a lunch dropout, set the wider window and let it ride through lunch, or request the feature.

Changes to any of these save automatically about a second after you stop editing — there's no separate Save button to remember.

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.

Does Slack have any native recurring schedule at all?

Not for presence. Slack's own help docs cover two adjacent features that get confused with a recurring status schedule, and neither one actually is:

• Scheduled status via Workflow Builder. You can build a workflow that fires on a fixed date/time and sets a status message, but Workflow Builder has no native "repeat every weekday" trigger — you'd need to rebuild the workflow's trigger manually or chain it to an external scheduler, and even then it only touches the status message, not the presence dot.
• "Set up Slack for work hours." Slack's help center walks through setting quiet hours for notifications (so DMs don't ping you outside a defined window) — useful for your own phone, but it changes notification delivery, not what your dot shows to other people.

Third-party calendar-scheduling tools like Reclaim.ai solve a related but different problem: they auto-block your calendar around meetings and focus time, and some can push a matching Slack status message from that calendar block. That's a status-message integration, the same category as the "auto-set status from your calendar" use case above — it still doesn't touch the presence dot, which is the actual green/hollow indicator this page is about.

Timezone and daylight saving time

A schedule is only useful if it survives your clocks changing twice a year. Stay Green On Slack stores your schedule against the IANA timezone you pick (e.g. America/New_York, not a fixed UTC offset), so when daylight saving time shifts, your 9am–5pm window stays 9am–5pm local time automatically — the server recalculates the UTC boundary every check, it doesn't drift by an hour until you manually fix it. This matters more than it sounds: a schedule stored as a raw UTC offset is exactly the kind of thing that quietly goes green an hour early or late every March and November until someone notices.

For teams split across timezones, each person sets their own schedule against their own local timezone independently — there's no single team-wide clock to keep in sync, which is also why "9–5 for the whole team" doesn't mean the same wall-clock hours for someone in Manila and someone in Denver.