Published Nov 4, 2026, 10:00 AM EST

After a 7-year corporate stint, Tanveer found his love for writing and tech too much to resist. An MBA in Marketing and the owner of a PC building business, he writes on PC hardware, technology, and Windows. When not scouring the web for ideas, he can be found building PCs, watching anime, or playing Smash Karts on his RTX 3080 (sigh).

My smart home is designed to make things simpler and more efficient for my needs, but that also makes it harder for someone new to get used to it. A relative staying for a week or a friend coming for a movie night can't get used to all the automations I have running for months and years, nor should they need to. This makes it tricky when I want to share curated access without making it feel like an awful lot of exposition.

Thanks to Home Assistant, doing this is easier than it seems. I basically need a way to pause the automations that I don't want during the time guests are staying at my home.…