How to Program Your Mac to Restart, Sleep, or Shut Down (Automatically)

One great thing about Mac computers is that they’re always ready when you need them – most of us just put them to sleep, allowing us to get back to work as soon as we wake up. That said, sometimes it’s best to restart or turn off your Mac altogether. Restarting or turning it off and back on helps your Mac free app memory and clear up many unseen issues.

Unfortunately, if you have an older Mac, restarting it means you’re going to have to wait a long time for it to be ready. Fortunately, Apple’s thought about this.

It turns out there are many ways for you to automatically restart your computer and even schedule a time and day for the Mac to shut down and turn back on without thinking about it.

How to Schedule Your Mac Desktop to Turn On or Off

If you have a Mac desktop, like an iMac, you can schedule a time for it to shut down, start back up, or go to sleep. All you need to do is find the Energy Saver option. Here’s how:

1. On your desktop Mac, click the Apple Menu in the top left corner.
2. Click System Preferences.
3. Select Energy Saver.
4. Click on Schedule at the bottom right corner of the window.
5. Select the options you want.
6. If you want to schedule a time for your Mac to wake or start, select the Start up or Wake checkbox. A pop-up menu will appear.
7. Choose the day or days you want your Mac to automatically turn on. Then enter a specific time.
8. If you want to schedule a sleep, restart, or shutdown time, select the other checkbox with the option Sleep. Select the day or days you want to schedule and enter a specific time.
9. Once you’re done, click on Apply.

How to Schedule Your MacBook to Turn On or Off

If you have a MacBook instead of a desktop Mac, the process is pretty similar but you’ll need to go to the Battery option in System Preferences. Just follow these steps:

1. On your MacBook, go to the Apple Menu in the top left corner.
2. Click on System Preferences.
3. Select Battery.
4. Click Schedule on the left-side menu.
5. If you want to schedule a time for your MacBook to wake or start, select the Start up or Wake checkbox. Choose the days you want your MacBook to wake or start and also choose a specific time.
6. For shutting down, sleeping, or restarting your MacBook, select the other checkbox and choose the days and time you want to schedule.
7. Finally, click Apply.

Had a change of heart? You can quickly revert any changes by clicking on Restore Previous Settings at the bottom of the window.

Keep in mind that it’ll need to be connected to the power adapter if you want to turn on your MacBook automatically.

How to Restart Your Mac Using Terminal

There’s actually another way for you to schedule your Mac to restart or turn off. For this, you’ll need to use Terminal.

Keep in mind that this isn’t the best way to do it or the easiest, for that matter. If you don’t want to mess with Terminal then we recommend using the previous tutorials. That said, if you want to check it out, here’s how:

First, open Terminal on your Mac or MacBook. You can search for it on your Launchpad or opening Finder by pressing Command + Spacebar.

Restart Your Computer Immediately

Open the Terminal app and enter this command:

% sudo shutdown -r now

Then press enter.

Restart Your Computer at a Specific Time

Open the Terminal app and enter this command:

% sudo shutdown -r hhmm

In this case, you’ll need to change a few things. You can change hhmm to the time you want the Mac to restart. There are two ways to do this:

• First you can type the year, month, day, hour, and minutes if you want to be more precise.
• The second format is +number, which is the number of minutes left until it restarts. For instance, you can write +50 if you want your Mac to restart in 50 minutes.

Finally, the letter -r. That means that your Mac will restart. If you want to shut it down, you need to change it for -h. And f you want to put it to sleep, you need to change it for -s