Differing Monitor Sleep Timeout by Time of Day

Microsoft PowerToys has a feature called Awake that can keep your computer awake (and optionally also keep the screen on) for longer periods or indefinitely, but I want short timeouts at night without setting it manually every evening. Here’s how to use a longer monitor sleep timeout at different times of day.

My goal is to have my monitors have a relatively lengthy 1-hour sleep timeout during working hours but a far shorter 3-minute sleep timeout after 10:00 PM.

Windows has had the ability to do this for ages, certainly since at least Windows 7. Power Plans in the Control Panel provide exactly what I’m after. These plans are often misunderstood or considered mysterious, but really they operate very analogous to Windows Desktop Themes in how they store and apply sets of preferences in a package that’s easy to switch all at once. In the same way a desktop theme provides a single switch that sets colors, wallpapers, cursors, fonts, and more all at once, a power plan provides a single switch that sets your system or display sleep timeouts, hard drive and network power management, and more as a single set too, and you can set it with a scheduled command. Here’s how to accomplish it.

Create your day and night power plans

1. In Control Panel, open Power Options, I set my current power theme (named “Balanced” although the name isn’t important) to use a long monitor timeout of 1 hour. I’ll use this after 8:00 AM on weekdays.
2. I choose Create a power plan and give it a name “Short Monitor Timeout” and set a timeout of 3 minutes. I’ll use this after 10:00 PM. Again the name here really doesn’t matter, it’s just a reference for you.

Now I have two power themes plans, but I need to tell Windows to switch to them on schedule. Here’s how I do that.

Note your Power Plan IDs

Before you set the schedule you just need to quickly note your Power Plan ID numbers.

I get the ID of my plans by typing powercfg /list at a command line. I can just leave that open and copy the IDs when I’m ready for them next.

Schedule the switch

Switching commands at any time is easy. You could go to the Control Panel and switch, or run the PowerCfg.exe command line and tell it which plan to be active. We’ll schedule this command to switch for us twice a day.

1. In Task Scheduler, I create a new basic task and name it “Switch to Nighttime”
2. I schedule it to occur at 10pm every night.

Here’s what you’ll place here, using the Plan ID from the command line earlier.

cmd /c powercfg /setactive PLAN_ID_GOES_HERE

When you click Next it ask if you wish to run the cmd program with the parameters that follow, click Yes, and then do the same thing to create another task for the daytime plan (I set mine to run at 8:00 AM). That’s it!