How to: set your status duration in Teams

Currently rolling out – and appearing to tenants – is the ability to set your status duration for determined amount of time. As you already might now you can set following statuses in Microsoft Teams:

And yes – you can hide yourself being even logged into to Teams by choosing Appear offline. This is useful if you are working on something, especially on off-hours, and you don’t want anyone even seeing that you are logged in Teams. However I encourage to use other means, like change management, to set common practices how people are expected to answer in Teams. Appearing offline can has it’s uses but let’s make a habit out of that.

Set a duration for your status

You can access the duration menu right below setting your status when you open the status dropdown. Yes – that arrow down is a real small one when using Desktop Teams. The Teams product team has still some work on the accessibility work there.

In the web version of Teams the menu is much more accessible

When you click on Duration you can set your status and desired time how long it stays active before reverting back to the previous status.

You get then choose the new status and how long it should stay on.

The Custom allows you to set the ending time for the desired half or full hour. You can’t schedule the status to end like 12:55, for example.

I noticed that the status didn’t reset back until I clicked the Teams once. It seems to be tied to the activity on client and not something happening in the cloud.