Hi all A thing I’ve struggled with in the past is trying to have a good and consistent morning routine. There are lots of things I need to do (brush my teeth, take my medications/vitamins, a few small chores) and lots of things I want to do (journaling, recording my weight/blood pressure, checking my RSS reader, etc.). I’d also like to have various automations set up to help with lots of these things.
That said, due to some health reasons (both mental and physical), I struggle a lot with sleep and especially with getting up at a consistent time. I can easily sleep through most alarms and often take anywhere from 30-90 minutes to wake up after whenever my alarm first goes off. I’d like to be able to use Shortcuts/iOS to detect when I’m actually awake rather than have some specific time-based trigger that may not actually be accurate.
For instance, iOS 17 has a great new feature to use Critical Alerts for medication reminders, but you need to schedule a particular time for it. What I’d love to do instead is use something like Due or a similar app, but have the reminder go off first a few minutes after I get up and then go off subsequently until I actually take them. There are many other automations I’d love to trigger based on when I am actually awake rather than on when my alarm goes off.
One idea I had is getting some kind of physical smart button and tying automations to that, but then I have to remember to hit it once I’m actually up. Does anyone else have ideas? I do live with my partner and two cats, so motion/presence sensors could get pretty tricky.
I see the iPhone has a “Waking from Sleep” trigger under personal automations, but I have no idea how accurate it is (I assume it at least needs an Apple Watch monitoring your sleep).
There is a trigger for unplugging your phone from a charger. Maybe use that and include a time check in your Shortcut to make sure it’s around the time you’re trying to get up so it doesn’t trigger every time you unplug your phone from a charger?
The Waking from sleep trigger is activated when sleep mode is turned off. You could use this and manually turn off sleep mode on your watch if you have one.
The When disconnected from power trigger with time constraints, suggested by @rbender would also work well.
The other option would be to create a Shortcut called something like I’m out of bed and then when you get up you can say “Hey Siri, I’m out of bed” to trigger it.
I also currently trying to work through my morning routine. Im using an NFC tag like @dustinknopoff suggested to turn off my sleep focus. My issue currently is that I often turn off my sleep focus manually while still in bed because I’m stubborn in the mornings.
Anyone have a good solution to lock myself out of doing that and requiring that I go to the NFC tag?
Perhaps slightly off topic, I wonder if there is an automation for when you put a watch on and unlock it. Likewise when you take it off. That - for me - would be a proxy for start and end of day.
I don’t think that there is. Apple Watch shows up in the list of devices in Settings > Bluetooth but it is not available in the list of bluetooth triggers on the iOS Automation tab in Shortcuts.
I’ve not tried the Any Device bluetooth trigger as I also don’t think that there is a way in Shortcuts to check if the watch is connected or not without just trying a Watch action and it failing if the Watch is not connected.
I sometimes check if the battery is charging or not to know if I am out of bed. For example, if I am in sleep mode and the battery is not charging my flashlight will switch on with the action button. If it is charging, then I start a note dictation action. Maybe you could trigger something based on the charging status in the morning.
A thing I’ve struggled with in the past is trying to have a good and consistent morning routine. There are lots of things I need to do (brush my teeth, take my medications/vitamins, a few small chores) and lots of things I want to do (journaling, recording my weight/blood pressure, checking my RSS reader, etc.). I’d also like to have various automations set up to help with lots of these things.