Nothing between nine at night and eight in the morning. Except one thing.
A quiet-hours setting with no exceptions is easy to build and occasionally useless. This one has exactly one exception, it is named, and it has its own switch so you can refuse it specifically.
The window, and what happens inside it.
| Between | What we send | What we do with the rest |
|---|---|---|
| 21:00 and 08:00 | The combine, and only if you left that switch on | Held until 08:00 |
| 08:00 and 21:00 | Everything else, subject to the four-a-week cap | Sent |
| Any hour, on a bank holiday | The same rules. The farm does not observe them either | Sent |
| Any hour, during lambing | The same rules. The camera runs; the notifications do not | Held |
| Christmas Day | Nothing at all, without exception, including the combine | Held to Boxing Day |
Why the combine ignores it.
In a difficult harvest the decision to cut is made at about half past five in the morning, on a moisture reading and a five-day forecast, and the machine is in the field by seven.
If we hold that notification until eight to be polite, the thing people most wanted to watch has already been happening for an hour. There is no version of this where the message is both courteous and useful.
So it goes when it goes, it is the only thing on the estate that does, and it has its own switch rather than hiding inside a general quiet-hours toggle. About a third of members turn it off, which is entirely reasonable and tells us the switch was worth building.
Setting your own hours.
Pick a start and an end
Anything you like. The default is 21:00 to 08:00 and about two-thirds of people leave it there.
Or set a wider window
The longest anybody has set is 19:00 to 10:00, which is a perfectly sensible way to live.
Choose whether the combine is exempt
Its own switch, defaulted on, and turning it off is not treated as a mistake.
Add a full-day pause
Up to thirty days. Nothing at all is sent, and nothing accumulates to arrive in a heap afterwards.
Everything still lands on the dashboard
Quiet hours suppress the interruption, not the record.
What the setting does and does not allow.
Allowed
- A start and an end time you choose
- A separate switch for the combine exemption
- A pause of up to thirty days
- Automatic adjustment for British Summer Time
- Christmas Day, silent, with no exceptions
Never
- A message that arrives at 07:58 to beat the window
- A digest that dumps eleven held messages at 08:01
- Any marketing message, at any hour, ever, without consent
- A second exception added later without telling you
The eleven-message dump, and why it does not happen.
The obvious way to build quiet hours is to queue everything and release it at eight. It is also the worst way, because it converts a quiet night into an unusable morning and teaches people that the setting makes things worse rather than better.
Held messages here are released at most two at a time, spaced, and anything that has stopped being true overnight is dropped rather than sent. A drop notification held from nine in the evening is usually pointless by eight, so it goes in the bin and appears on the dashboard instead.
The four-a-week cap still applies to everything released, which means a genuinely busy night produces two messages in the morning and a slightly longer dashboard.
Quiet hours, questioned.
It follows the timezone your phone reports, so a member in Sydney gets their own nine to eight rather than ours. Email follows the same rule.
Yes, by turning all twelve events off. That is a cleaner way of doing it than a twenty-four-hour quiet window, and it is the same outcome.
Because nobody is combining on Christmas Day and there is nothing on this farm that cannot wait until the twenty-sixth.
What actually fires a notification.
Four event types, and the difference between an event and a schedule.
