Setting your status

Your Cradle presence tells Cradle and your teammates whether you're ready to take calls. Most of the time you can leave it alone, the automatic settings will handle the day-to-day. There are two times worth setting it manually: heading into a meeting, and finishing for the day.

Before you start

If you're new to presence, read How does presence work? first. This article assumes you know the states.

Change your status, the two ways

Both routes do the same thing. Pick whichever is faster from where you are.

From the settings screen

Open the Cradle desktop app.
Go to the settings screen.
Click on your name at the top of the presence panel.
Pick a state, Available, Away, Busy, or Offline (manual).

From the system tray / menu bar

Windows: click the Cradle icon in the system tray (bottom right of the screen, near the clock). A menu appears with your presence options.
macOS: click the Cradle icon in the menu bar (top right of the screen). A menu appears with your presence options.

The tray / menu-bar route works whether the Cradle app window is open or not.

When to set each one manually

Available, when you want calls. You don't usually need to set this yourself; Cradle puts you here when you launch the app and when you come back from Idle.
Away, when you've stepped away for a few minutes. Cradle will still send you calls if no-one else picks up first.
Busy, when you're in a meeting, on a deep-focus task, or otherwise can't take a call. Calls won't ring you. Teammates can still see you and transfer to you if they need to.
Offline (manual), when you're done for the day but still have the app running. Quitting the app does the same thing automatically.

The automatic settings

Three automatic settings live in the same panel as the presence states. They're the difference between forgetting to update your status and never needing to.

Automatically set me to away after

Sets you to Idle (same effect as Away) when your computer hasn't been touched for the chosen length of time. Useful for short coffees and lunches.

Open the settings screen in the Cradle desktop app.
Find Automatically set me to away after in the presence panel.
Pick 1 MIN, 2 MIN, 5 MIN, 10 MIN, or Never to disable.

The default is 2 minutes. Never turns it off entirely if you'd rather manage your own status.

Offline detection

When this is on, Cradle sets you Offline automatically when you quit the app, when your computer goes to sleep, or when you lose your internet connection. This is your end-of-day safety net.

Open the settings screen.
Find Offline detection in the presence panel.
Toggle it on or off.

We recommend leaving this on, without it, a flat laptop battery overnight can leave you looking Available to your team while no calls actually reach you.

Wrap-up time

A short window after a call ends where Cradle won't send you a new call, so you can finish notes and take a breath. See Wrap-up time for the detail.

What you should see

Your name on the settings screen shows the colour and label of whatever state you just picked.
The Cradle tray / menu-bar icon changes to match.
Your teammates see the new state on the team screen.

If it doesn't work

My presence changes back to something else on its own. That's the automatic settings doing their job. If it's switching to Idle when you don't want it to, set Automatically set me to away after to Never.
I'm logged in on two computers and my presence keeps changing. Cradle uses one presence per account, so two computers fight each other. Quit Cradle on the computer you're not using.
I set myself to Busy but I'm still getting calls. Direct calls and transfers from teammates can still come through. Only the automatic routing from Cradle is blocked by Busy. See How does presence work? for the difference.