In my last post I made it a point to laud the Gestures app for Window 8.1 (Lumia Denim). In this post I am going to briefly describe an issue I have with Quiet Hours. Quiet Hours is a feature to Cortana that allows you to configure just how silent you want silent mode to be and when. You can turn Quiet Hours on Right Now, at specific times, or when one or several calendars have an appointment marked as busy. You can also configure rules for breakthrough (e.g. if it is a member of the “inner circle”, or they call 2 times in 3 minutes). You can also configure a response message to your callers indicating you are unavailable.

I would like to see the option to allow breakthrough for the 1st call or for contacts associated with an appointment. My reason for this is that I mark appointments as busy so that I do not get interrupted on an important call. The problem comes when my important calls are for contacts not in my inner circle and they are calling me. If they don’t call me before the time the appointment is set for, they get blocked.