As I struggle to be more intentional with my time, one of the things that I like to do is power down my MacBook to add some friction to using it after hours. Since it mostly sits on my desk in clamshell mode in a vertical stand, taking it out of the stand and opening it up to power it on adds just enough friction to make me question whether I should be getting on my laptop. However, that same friction that keeps me from turning it on also keeps me from turning off my laptop more often, usually saving it for the weekends when I don’t plan on using it at all. I wouldn’t mind shutting it down at the end of my workday and leaving it off until the next morning, but the friction of taking it out of the dock every day prevents me from doing that. I decided to search if there were any solutions I might be able to employ when I learned that MacOS already has a built in way to solve my problem with the pmset command.
The pmset command is a utility that helps you manipulate the power management setting of your MacBook. Using this command you can tell your Macbook to turn on at a specific time every day. Setting a repeating wake or power-on schedule is pretty simple to do from a terminal.
sudo pmset repeat wakeorpoweron MTWRFSU 07:00:00
MTWRFSU represents days of the week (Mon–Sun), and time must be in hh:mm:ss 24‑hour format. Notice that days that have the same first initial get different letters (Thursday (R) and Sunday (U)))
You can check to see what your current schedule is set to with the following command.
pmset -g sched
To cancel the schedule you can
sudo pmset repeat cancel
This allowed me to set up a schedule where my MacBook turns on every day except for Saturday at 07:00.
sudo pmset repeat wakeorpoweron MTWRFU 07:00:00