How To Schedule Start Up, Shut Down or Restart In macOS Ventura

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to schedule Shutdown, Startup, and Restart times on your Mac in Ventura. 

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So when macOS Monterey and before there was a way to go into your System Preferences and then set a scheduled Startup time, Shutdown time, or Restart time on your Mac. Now most people should never really need this. You should just be able to put your Mac to Sleep, have it Sleep at night and do all of its different system maintenance then when you're not using it, and then just wake it up in the morning. There's really no reason to Shutdown your Mac. But if you did use this feature you may be shocked to find that in Ventura it is missing. It's not in System Settings. There is no way to set a Startup, Shutdown, Restart time or anything like that. But the functionality isn't completely gone. All that System Preferences did is give you a shortcut to setting something that you could do in Terminal. You could still do it with the Terminal in macOS Ventura. 

So in Terminal if you wanted to set, say, a Restart time to have your Mac restart every night at 3:00 a.m. you could do it using the PMSet Command. Now you have to start with sudo. Sudo mean that you want to run this command with Administrative privileges. So it is going to prompt you for a password. But if you don't start with sudo you're not going to be able to execute this command. Now do pmset. PM stands for power manager. What we're doing here is setting a repeating command. So its repeat and then what we want to repeat. So in this case restart. Then you have to give it the time that you want it to restart. But that starts first with the day of the week. So you use letters for each day. For instance, M is Monday. The other days of the week kind of make sense, but of course there are repeats. So T is Tuesday, W is Wednesday, Thursday though is R, Friday is F, Saturday is S, and Sunday is U. So if you want all seven days you just do that MTWRFSU. If you want to skip a day, like not have it do it on Wednesday, just remove that one. Then you have to give it a time. Time is in a pretty standard format. So 03 for 3:00 a.m.. Zero minutes, zero seconds. It is a 24 hour time. So if you wanted it to be at, say, 3 in the afternoon you would use 15. 

Now when you hit Return it is going to ask you for your password. That's what the sudo does. It is asking for administrative privileges. So note that you may not be able to actually use this command if you're user account is a standard user account, not an admin user account. So you can see executed without any errors. Not to check to see that it is there. We'll use pmset again. We don't need to use sudo for this because we're just checking. So we want to do dash  g and scheduled but just abbreviate it like that.

-g sched. Then we'll see there repeating power events restart at 3:00 a.m. every day.

Now let's say we didn't want to use Restart. We wanted to do Shutdown. Well, there is actually a Shutdown option as well. There is also Power On which will startup you're Mac if it has been shutdown or wakeorpoweron, all run together like one word, and that will either wakeup you Mac when it is sleeping or start it up if it has been shutdown. There is also Sleep and Wake. Then the very important one Cancel. This will erase all of the power events. So you do that and now if I look at the schedule its empty.

Now you can also schedule an event to happen at a specific time. So you can use

sudo pmset and instead of repeat you do schedule spelled out. Let's say you want to do a Restart and you want to put in quotes here when this is going to happen. So you want to give a date, like for instance 10/31/22 and then at a specific time. Like let's say 09:00:00 (9 a.m.) Now when you do that and you list what's there you'll see the schedule. So you can have multiple ones of these. Sometimes you may actually find one already there. If you have an Update coming, say a security update or minor software update, then your Mac may have scheduled a Restart for it. So if you see one there and it is set by something other than pmset it's probably something your Mac is going to do in order to perform an update or something.  

Now to cancel these you need to use sudo then pmset then schedule cancel and then the number. So you can see the number here on the left. So I'll cancel zero here and it cancels that and now my schedule is back to nothing. 

Now I know you're thinking this can't possibly be how Apple wants us to set these schedules. But it is!. I guess Apple has depreciated this feature to the point where it is not going to be in the Settings App anymore. It's something you have to do using the Terminal. The proof that this is how Apple wants you to do it here's the official page on the Apple site on how to do this. Notice you can select your version of macOS. I have it set to Monterey. It tells you to go into System Preferences. If I change the version to Ventura you could see here that Apple is asking you to use the Terminal to do this and giving you an example here. 

Now if you want to see what else the Power Manager can do you can do man for manual and then pmset. Then you get this very long manual page that gives you everything that pmset can do. pmset can actually do a lot more than just schedules and repeats. But you probably want to avoid doing anything else with it unless you really know what it is you're doing. Now before we looked at pmset -g for the schedule. But if we leave off sched and we put just -g we get a rundown of a lot of your other power settings including your Sleep Time. Sleep Time can be found in macOS Ventura by going to the Lock Screen right here. Then you'll see Turn Display Off When Inactive and you could see it set for 10 minutes. That indeed is the value there. If I were to change it to 5 minutes then if I were to reissue this command you could see now it's 5. Note you also get some other useful information here. Like, for instance, Display Sleep is currently being prevented by my Screen Recording App, as it should be.

Now if you want to use Repeated Power Event or Scheduling a lot one of the things you may want to look into is using Shortcuts to do it. In the Shortcuts App if you create a new shortcut you can search for Terminal here. You can select Run Shell script and you could put a shell script command in here. You can even set it to run as Administrator so it will prompt just like asking for sudo. Then if you're good at using Shortcuts you can feed in items into here. So you can have a shortcut that say asks for a specific time for a shutdown and then issues the Terminal command to schedule it. I'm not going to go any deeper into it here but it is something you may want to explore if you've got some programming skills. Of course if you do have programming skills then you'll probably end up wanting to use Terminal for this anyway.

I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.