The problem
A phone in a child’s room is useful right up until 11pm, when it is a machine for waking a household on behalf of strangers.
The usual answers are all bad. Turning the ringer off means the phone is useless in an emergency and stays off for a week because nobody remembers. Unplugging it is the same thing with extra steps. Do-not-disturb on a mobile is per-device, so it has to be set on every phone by every person.
What quiet hours do
A named window, defined once:
[[schedules]]
id = "school-night"
start = "20:30"
end = "07:00"
days = ["SU", "MO", "TU", "WE", "TH"]Any line can reference it. During the window that line does not ring at all — the caller goes straight to voicemail, and the house stays asleep.
Or the call goes somewhere that is awake:
afterhours = "school-night"
afterhours_ring = ["adults"]Now a 2am call for the kids’ line rings the adults instead. If nobody answers that, it still takes a message, so the redirect narrows what happens during the window rather than removing the safety net.
What that one field expresses
- Homework hours. Four to six, ring the adults rather than the study.
- A rotating night shift. One parent Monday to Wednesday, the other the rest, without the caller needing to know whose night it is.
- A babysitter. The evening window rings whoever is actually in the house.
Details worth knowing
A window that crosses midnight belongs to the day it starts. 20:30–07:00
on Monday covers Monday evening through Tuesday morning. That is why a
school-night schedule lists Sunday through Thursday: Friday and Saturday
evenings stay open, which is what you meant.
enabled = false is the holiday switch. One edit turns bedtime off for
spring break without hunting through every line that references it — and turns
it back on without reconstructing the times from memory.
Schedules are shared. Define school-night once and every line that should
respect it points at the same window, so there is one place to change when term
ends.