Stop Zap during certain times regardless of timezone (US)

Heya @keithk! Thanks for reaching out and welcome to the Community!

Hmm, I wonder if this article might be helpful for your use case?

• https://zapier.com/help/create/customize/schedule-zaps-to-run-at-specific-intervals

There’s also a solution in this thread here that could be useful:

Specifically this bit here:

Filtering Between Certain Dates and Times

If your Trigger sends along a date and time field, you can use the "After Date/Time" and "Before Date/Time" filters to specify a date and time range.
The tricky part to remember is that the Date/Time filter is going to look for a full date and time - you can't specify one or the other.

In this example, the Zap will only continue to the next step if the Trigger was updated between 2015-08-15 3:00 AM and 2015-08-25 7:00 AM.

 

It’s also a best practice to set these 2 options on the Formatter steps.

I hope some of this helps! Keep us posted. 🙂

Having Zapier identify it’s X time in Y zone was the difficult part. I had to get a 3rd party API that would pull the timezone so I can use it in the formatter. ~10 steps might be too excessive for this use case. I wish you’d make it easier for us to comply with TCPA quiet hours.

Hey @keithkk, thanks for letting us know how you got around this! I can totally understand how 10 steps would feel excessive as well as the need to comply with TCPA quiet hours.

Curious:

• How is your Zap set up now?
• Which 3rd-party API are you using?
• What is your trigger app?
• Which SMS app are you using?

I would love to explore this further if you’re up for it, to see if we can come up with a workaround that’s much less tedious for your use case. At the very least, I may be able to put a feature request in on your behalf, to make this easier in the future. Let us know!

@jesse, great, hopefully you can give me more clarity. I currently use timezonedb to get the time zone based on longitude and latitude values. It also returns the current time. I send an email and if it’s outside quiet hours, I send an SMS via EZTexting.

On the Zapier Filter, does it read time zone values like the sample below?

If [hh:mm:ss] EST (Date/Time)After [8:00:00 EST]
or...
If [hh:mm:ss] America/New_York (Date/Time)After [8:00:00 America/New_York]

 

Hey @keithk!

Any chance we could get a screenshot of what your Zap looks like?

Something like this…

… and maybe any extra info that would help us understand what everything does. It does seem like we should be able to do this with fewer steps, but without knowing all the pieces, it’s hard to recommend some alternate approaches :)