Once you start to unleash the power of Zapier you will more than likely need to schedule a step to run at some point in the future. For example, you might want to set up a cadence of sales emails to follow up leads. You may want to automatically create project tasks to be actioned on a certain day. Or you might want to send a reminder at a set time before a calendar event is due.
All of these things require you to express the date or time that you want something to happen, and this useful guide will give you a head start to show you how to express dates in Zapier so that you can become an automation superhero too!
Using specific dates in Zapier
If you want to specify a step in a zap to happen on a specific date (and/or at a specific time) then you can express that date in a number of ways. Note that some apps use the 24-hour clock and others allow an am/pm qualifier. You can also include the time zone if it’s different to yours.
Here are three ways of defining a specific date in Zapier:
- MM/DD/YYYY HH:MMam/pm [TIMEZONE], e.g. 4/29/2021 10am GMT
- Standard ISO format, e.g. 2021-04-29T14:45
- UNIX timestamp, which is the number of seconds since 1/1/1970, e.g. 1619521823
You can find out more about ISO date formats here, and UNIX timestamps here.
Using relative dates in Zapier
Now although it’s useful to be able to set a specific date in a zap, what’s more powerful are the relative dates you can express.
For example, you may want to process any invoices on a Monday, so if you have an automation related to this then you can schedule it to happen ‘next Monday’.
Or you may want to automatically create a project task but for it always to be due the next day, so you can set the date to be ‘tomorrow’.
You can also use ‘next week Thursday’.
If you want to schedule something to happen in two hours then you can say ‘+2h’.
Or you can set a date to be yesterday by setting it to ‘-1d’.
Zapier has an article on how to adjust dates and times which you can read here.
Relative date and time codes
Using the ‘+2h’ and ‘-1d’ codes is so useful, but you need to know all the codes you can use. Although most are obvious, it’s important to know the codes for ‘minutes’ and ‘months’ otherwise the time conversions may not happen as you expect them to!
- s = seconds
- m = minutes
- h = hours
- d = days
- month = months
- y = years
You can also use multiple codes, for example, if you wanted something to happen in two weeks and one day then you would use ‘+2w +1d’.
Time zones
If you don’t specify a time zone then Zapier uses the time zone from your account. If you check the ‘My Profile’ page then you should have a time zone specified. If it’s empty then choose the right one from the dropdown list.
Zap meta human
If you want to add the current day and time to a Zap, you can use the handy ‘zap meta human’ trick. Though this may sound complicated, it’s as simple as typing a phrase into the field of your Zap. Then, when the Zap runs, it will insert the time/date of the Zap run into the field. Here are three examples:
- {{zap_meta_human_now}} – returns a human-readable date/time based on the default time zone in your profile.
- {{zap_meta_timestamp}} – gives you a the time in UNIX (a format that some apps prefer)
- {{zap_meta_utc_iso}} – provides the time/date in UTC (i.e. without a timezone) and formatted as a date/time stamp e.g. “2024-07-04T10:04:03+00:00”
You can find out more about how to insert the time your zap runs here including other timestamps which are available.
Changing the date format in Zapier
Now that you’ve learned how to express dates in Zapier, you may want to make them look nicer when they’re displayed to a human being, as ISO and UNIX dates aren’t very visually pleasing or user-friendly! Even more normal dates might not be displayed how you’d like, for example, ‘2021-04-29T14:45’ might look nicer as ‘29th April 2021’.
Zapier has an inbuilt Formatter app that can convert dates and times from many different formats to others. You can find out more here or download our cheat sheet which lists all the inbuilt Zapier functions which are brilliant automation shortcuts.
More useful Zapier articles
Once you get started with Zapier there’s so much you can do with it and we have plenty of articles which could spark ideas!
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