So, you don’t need an automation per entity. You can add additional entities to the trigger seen here (you can add groups too, kitchenlights is a group of 4 lights):

As circled above, you can also set a “for” time, in this case when the light is on for 15 min.

The time condition has the option for a day off the week. Just leave the time portion blank.

To keep this all in one automation, skip the condition section and go to the action section.

Use the choose block and set the conditions under an option

The action will be a template

service: light.turn_off target: entity_id: “{{ trigger.entity_id }}” data: {}

Edit formatting

Create a helper group that has all the lights.

Trigger:

Helper group turns on for 30 min

Condition:

I used time after and before as a fixed time.

Action:

service turn off with a target of the helper group

Should result in the trigger firing 30min after ANY light turns on and only turning them off at the set time.

You can call a service on an area, that’s what I do

If you want different behaviors on different days, you can use conditionals to check. I’d probably have a weekend automation vs a weekday one tho.

Generally, I just base my light states on motion sensors, turn on if motion, turn off if the motion sensor reports unoccupied

Keep things as simple in ha automations as possible because it really sucks trying to do anything more complicated. That’s when people turn to node red

Not a particularly helpful comment but I struggled with this kinda thing until switching to Node Red. It made complex things much easier to get working.

This is a great case for templates. Templates are Home Assistant’s way of doing dynamic actions or data.

When: whatever triggers you need for the lights - can be multiple triggers or one trigger with every light/switch listed, with a For clause. The list is "OR"ed so do however you want. You could use a group but then all devices would be changed together - which doesn’t sound like is what you want.

And if: Whatever conditions you want, time, day of week, etc.

Then do: The action is where it gets interesting add an action to execute “Generic turn off”, select any device (we’ll change that in a moment). The reason for the “Generic turn off” is that it works with devices in any domain (light or switch). Then drop into the YAML view and chcange the entity_id value to this template: '{{ trigger.from_state.entity_id }}'. The trigger is a variable that’s available inside the automation and can be used instead of specifying a static value somewhere. https://www.home-assistant.io/docs/automation/trigger/ for details on triggers.

Here’s the complete automation, you could create a new empty automation, then copy and paste this in place and just change the trigger and conditions as you want.

alias: Action - Turn off lights 15min after turned on during day
description: ""
trigger:
  - platform: state
    entity_id:
      - switch.porch_light
    for:
      hours: 0
      minutes: 15
      seconds: 0
    enabled: true
    to: "on"
    from: "off"
condition:
  - condition: sun
    after: sunrise
    after_offset: "30"
  - condition: time
    after: "01:00:00"
    before: "23:00:00"
    weekday:
      - sun
      - mon
      - tue
      - wed
      - thu
      - fri
      - sat
action:
  - service: homeassistant.turn_off
    metadata: {}
    data: {}
    target:
      entity_id: "{{ trigger.from_state.entity_id }}"
mode: queued
max: 10

I use scenes to control my lights and use those in my automations instead. This lets me create “groups” of lights to control.

or just use pyscript.