Hello, Google!
You know that green eco-friendly button on ATMs when you don’t want a receipt? It collectively saves costs and resources, assuming it’s not just a European thing.
I’ve come up with a similar button for you!
We are a small company that uses Google Workspace and Google Cloud Console. My idea is definitely not aimed at companies that sell 24/7, so it shouldn’t have any impact on Console revenue. It’s more about the masses of micro-users like us—people who don’t run an e-shop but still need to connect a CRM system with other tools.
What if scripts could sleep at night?
My original intention was simply that I don’t really need my colleagues to be disturbed by notifications between 8 PM and 7 AM telling them that a new lead has arrived. They’ll only get to it in the morning anyway, and who’s that curious about new leads in the middle of the night?
But then it occurred to me—I was failing Pascal back in high school—and today I can vibe-code a basic CRM system. How many people like me are there going to be? How many scripts are running unnecessarily overnight? And how much could that save in operating costs?
A quick bit of research led me to believe it wouldn’t be more than a few dozen cents/year. But how many times over? One million times? Five million times? Ten million?
This could be your green button for scripts:
“Would you like to let this script sleep overnight?”
It would surely save the equivalent of many thousands of tons of apples.
PS: My interrupted script got stuck, and I had to deploy a WatchDog system that checks every 30 minutes whether it’s still running correctly. It may be difficult to modify every script individually, but adding a trigger that is disabled overnight—and optionally monitored as a supplement to the original script—is something even I managed to implement today.
PPS: This is certainly not a miracle solution. It’s more like an ocean made of drops.
PPPS: Maybe this is a silly idea that would have been more interesting five years ago, but I built the script for our HVAC company, which tries to promote environmentally friendly solutions, and I think it would be great if scripts that can sleep overnight were simply allowed to sleep overnight. Across the board. With a green button.
Have a wonderful day.