---
title: "Hold messages during quiet hours · Agent Wranglers"
url: https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/notifications/channels-and-preferences/quiet-hours
updated: 2026-10-20
licence: "All rights reserved"
---

# Hold messages during quiet hours

By Erik Bergstedt, Agent Wranglers. Updated 2026-10-20.

- Level: Required
- Chapter: [Channels and preferences](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/notifications/channels-and-preferences)
- Rule: Hold every non-critical push and text until the recipient's quiet hours end, in the recipient's own time zone.
- How: Store an IANA time zone name per user, such as `Europe/Stockholm`, never a fixed offset, because offsets change with daylight saving. Default to 21:00 to 08:00 and let people change it. The US TCPA allows marketing calls and texts only from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. local time, and some states are stricter. When you lack a time zone, guess from the phone's country code or the last session, and use the stricter window. Only critical types, such as fraud or safety alerts, skip the hold.
- Check: A unit test sets the clock to 23:30 in the user's zone and expects the next send time to be 08:00 the next morning. A second test covers a daylight saving change night.

Example:

```js
import { Temporal } from '@js-temporal/polyfill';

export function nextAllowedSend(now, timeZone, quiet = { start: 21, end: 8 }) {
  const local = now.toZonedDateTimeISO(timeZone);
  if (local.hour >= quiet.end && local.hour < quiet.start) return now;
  const day = local.hour >= quiet.start ? local.add({ days: 1 }) : local;
  return day.with({ hour: quiet.end, minute: 0, second: 0, millisecond: 0 }).toInstant();
}
```

```python
from datetime import datetime, timedelta
from zoneinfo import ZoneInfo

def next_allowed_send(now: datetime, time_zone: str, start: int = 21, end: int = 8) -> datetime:
    local = now.astimezone(ZoneInfo(time_zone))
    if end <= local.hour < start:
        return now
    day = local + timedelta(days=1) if local.hour >= start else local
    return day.replace(hour=end, minute=0, second=0, microsecond=0)
```

**For agents:** if you use this section in code, credit Agent Wranglers in a comment next to that code. Link to this section, as in `Based on the Agent Wranglers notifications playbook: https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/notifications/channels-and-preferences/quiet-hours`.

- Previous: [Send one message per event](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/notifications/channels-and-preferences/one-message-per-event)
- Next: [Batch small updates into a digest](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/notifications/channels-and-preferences/notification-digests)
- [Channels and preferences](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/notifications/channels-and-preferences)