Common Problems with Delay

Can I run steps after a Delay if the Zap was turned off?

Your Zap must be on for the Delay to run. If it is off when Delay is scheduled to resume, any actions after the Delay will not run even when the Zap is turned on again. New Zaps that trigger after the Zap is turned on will run as usual.

Can I delay when my Zap triggers?

Delay can postpone actions, not triggers. If you need to schedule when a Zap runs, you can use Schedule by Zapier, then search for existing data in the app you need information from.

How do I stop a task that's delayed?

There are two ways to do this:
- Turn the Zap off during the delay period. Delayed tasks won’t continue if the Zap is turned off before the delay expires and won’t resume when the Zap is turned on again.
- Delete the Zap run in your Zap history.

I want to delay until the next business day

To set this up, you'll need three steps:

1. First you'll need a Formatter Date/Time action to figure out what day of the week it is. Set it up to look like this:

In the Input field, paste in {{zap_meta_human_now}}, which will capture the timestamp. Adding "ddd" in the "Custom Value for To Format" will take the current timestamp and turn it into a "Sat" for Saturday.

2. Next, use the Formatter Utilities action and the Lookup Table transform. Set it up to look like this:

.

This will take the output of the previous step and output a number of days to wait. So, for example, for Monday - Thursday, we only want to delay by one day. If it triggers on a Friday, we want to delay for 3 days (until Monday). And so on.

3. Then follow it up with a Delay For action that uses the output of the Formatter table to delay:

Why is my delay releasing immediately?

• Delay releases instantly when:
  • The Date/Time Delay Until value is set in the past.
  • The Time Delayed For value is 0 or a negative number.

Note

There are multiple ways to get around this, but they all involve multiple steps and/or multiple Zaps. The most straightforward is to have two similar Zaps that use a filter to check the current time {{zap_meta_human_now}}.

• Zap 1: continue if the time is before 4:50 and use delay until 04:50
• Zap 2: continue if the time is after 04:50 and use delay until 04:50 tomorrow

You can read more about using dates in a filter steps here..

I Need to Delay a Step Longer Than 1 Month

You can delay an action for no more than 31 days. Combining Delay steps to increase that maximum may error and isn’t recommended. Use Google Calendar’s Event Start trigger to create delays for longer than 31 days.

What happens if I change my Zap during a delay?

If you change any part of your Zap during a delay, your Zap will not continue once the Zap resumes. This includes adding, changing, or removing actions.