[kovidgoyal]

No there is no other way. If a periodical is a favorite, you're likely to want it downloaded automatically. If you dont want to download periodicals automatically, you can set the schedule to a large interval. Only your particular case of download automatically sometimes and not other times is not covered, and I, for one am not motivated to cover it. You can acheive what you want by editing the scheduler config file manually (preferences->miscellaneous->open config directory) and then edit the file scheduler.xml in any text editor like notepad. Keep two versions of the file that you can swap between easily.