"When should automated LinkedIn outreach send? Hours, weekdays and time zones"

Short answer: automated LinkedIn outreach should send during the working hours of the people you're writing to, on working days, in the time zone of the account sending it, and never in a burst. A window of 08:00–20:00, Monday to Friday, is a sensible default. Change it only when your prospects' working day is different.

Why the hour matters

Two things, and neither depends on a rule LinkedIn publishes, because it doesn't publish one.

For the person reading. A first message that lands at 03:10 on a Sunday looks like what it is: something that runs by itself. Even a well-written message loses some of its warmth when the timestamp gives it away. A message at 10:30 on a Tuesday looks like someone at a desk.

For the account. A real person doesn't invite, view profiles and message at the same minute every day, around the clock, seven days a week. We can't tell you how LinkedIn weighs that pattern, and we'd distrust anyone who claims to. But an account whose activity looks like a working day is a safer bet than one that is active at all hours. It's the same reasoning behind keeping daily invite numbers modest.

How a sending window works

Each LinkedIn account in NudgeLink has its own sending window: a start hour, an end hour and the days of the week, all in that account's time zone. A New York account and a Berlin account each send in their own working hours.

Everything automatic waits for the window: profile views, likes, comments, invites, messages, reminders and emails, including drafts you approved. If you approve a draft at 22:00, it waits for the next window. Inside the window, actions go out at random moments, not on the hour and not in a burst.

New accounts send 08:00–20:00, Monday to Friday. The window must be at least four hours long, because a shorter one can't fit a day's invites with human-looking gaps.

You change it per account on the Accounts page: the hours and the days. The details are in the warm-up and account safety docs.

What the window doesn't change

• Daily caps. The limits on invites, messages and the rest still reset at midnight UTC, whatever your window says. The window decides when during the day actions run, not how many.
• Messages you type yourself. If you reply to someone in the Inbox, it's sent immediately. A person writing by hand is never delayed.
• Draft writing. Drafts are written at any hour and wait for your approval. Only the sending waits for the window.

What we got wrong until October 2026

Until 6 October 2026, only connection requests respected sending hours, and even those ran every day of the week. Messages, reminders and approved drafts could go out at any hour, including the middle of the night in the recipient's time zone.

It was a gap, and we fixed it. Every automatic action now follows the window. To avoid changing anything under campaigns that were already running, accounts that existed before that date kept all seven days. New accounts default to Monday to Friday. If one of your older accounts still sends on weekends and you don't want it to, switch the days off on the Accounts page.

How to choose your window

Start from your prospects, not from your own day. If you write to owners of small firms in Poland, 08:00–18:00 on weekdays is a reasonable window. If your targets are in another time zone, set the account's time zone to match them, not to where you sit. That's a judgment call, not a measured result: we don't have data on which hours get the most replies, and we'd rather say so than invent a number.

Keep the window wide enough to spread out. A narrow window pushes the day's activity into a few hours, which looks more like a burst. Eight hours or more gives the gaps room.

Check the time zone. A new account takes the time zone of the browser you connected it from, which is usually right. If you connected from somewhere else, check it. A window in the wrong time zone is a window at the wrong hours. The account's send-window time zone is a setting on the Accounts page.

Weekends are a choice, not a default. For B2B outreach, a Saturday message is rarely better than a Monday one. If your prospects really do work weekends, as some shops and clinics do, add the days.

If you want to see where the rest of the safety rules sit, the warm-up docs list the pace, the daily caps and the window in one place. And if you're deciding how the messages themselves should read once they go out, start with what to write in the first message.