How not to be a complete jackass with your iPhone alarm settings.

Posted: December 13th, 2011 | Author: Erica | Filed under: The Mobile Web | Tags: alarm, iPhone, manners, marriage advice | 2 Comments »

It’s glorious that society is post-physical alarm clock, with its unsightly power cords and demanding digital display, glowing up your darkness and inexorably marking the passage of precious sleep time with its anxiety-provoking accuracy.

None of that was very relaxing.

But now that we all have iPhones under our pillows, fumbling and buzzing our way through 6 snoozes is pretty obnoxious to any habitual sleep partners.

How can we be the least irritating with our iPhone alarms?

How much you disbturb others depends on your alarm sound and how much vibrating is going on.

If you’re phone’s set to vibrate with notifications as a rule, you’re going to vibe the heck out of people.

I kinda thought going ‘silent’ would fix that—it doesn’t. You still get full-on vibe & tone (it is intended to be an alarm, after all.) If you have headphones in the jack, the tone only goes through the headphones, but your bed is still rocking with the vibe.

The one thing you can do to make this setting contain less shock and awe is to turn down the external volume on your phone. You probably don’t need it full blast to wake yourself up, what with the vibrational earthquake in effect.

Think about if you really need that vibration in the supposed silence.

When is this beneficial? To announce your general importance in meetings?

Turning off ‘vibrate’ like this (Settings > Sounds) will give you a more peaceful wakeup and you’ll still get an attention-grabbing vibrate in meetings should a vital tweet come through (if the phone is not set to ‘silent’). Good compromise.

The reverse of this setting, btw, will wake you up sans vibe, but is up to you for meetings—you’ll get a tone for messages if volume is on, a buzz if volume is off.

Liking your newfound seismic stability? Go on ahead & shut of the other totally-not confusingly name ‘vibrate’ setting, and notice peace multiply.

One last kindess you can enact to keep your wakeup minimal for your partner is to either turn snooze off (Clock > Alarm > Individual Alarm settings)—too ambitious for me—or set yourself several alarms & pick the one that’s actually realistic.

I’m going to try this whole ‘no-vibe-at-all’ thing for a few days & see if I miss anything critical. Next stop in my quest for mental health: turning off push notifications! (Just kidding).