Tell me your alarms setup

August 30, 2023 8:22 AM

I am grumpily accepting that my particular brain needs a lot of help of the "set yourself a ton of alarms" variety. If you are the same, what does your actual setup for these alarms look like?

I spent most of grad school cycling through various to-do list and productivity apps, before ultimately landing on Obsidian (plaintext, links) plus a physical bullet journal. I shift in and out of actually using these, but they are reliable and easy to pick up again after lapsing. Bells-and-whistles apps tended to be overbuilt and/or not suited to my particular kinds of taks. Or the makers stop supporting it/it suffers from scope creep (Evernote).

I'd like to tackle the related "alarms/notifications" side of this equation. I've been chronically setting random alarms using my android system clock, and it's a frustrating experience if I want to have more than a few going.

So, if you are a "set a million alarms/calendar notifications" person, how are you implementing that? Open to apps, desktop programs, physical timers, splitting different kinds of notifications onto different systems, some different way to think about my native android alarm clock, and low-, medium- and high-tech hacks of all kinds.

I am at least as interested in "this is what my approach generally looks like in practice" as "here is why app X is the best" - thank you in advance!

posted by heyforfour to Grab Bag (6 answers total)

Both my personal and work calendars are on google calendar. When I have an unusual or infrequent event, I often set multiple alarms, starting with 1 hour ahead (or whatever amount of time allows me to go from sitting around unshowered in PJs to arriving on time and presentable), half hour and when I need to leave. This would stuff like a hair appointment on a random Saturday or drinks with a friend that I scheduled 3 weeks ago.

For things I need to do on a specific day but not necessarily at a specific time, I make an all day event. Typically these are repeating and I make a couple of alarms for it a few hours apart. This is things like give the dog heartworm meds or change the AC filters or even pay water bill or call Fred about tree trimming.

My work events (where I’m sitting at a computer all day, looking at my calendar often, and just have to log on to the zoom) have a 10 minute reminder. My work happens to use google, but I would set this up similarly for Outlook or whatever.

The ability to set as many alarms as you want for an appointment or event in google calendar makes all this work for me.

I use my phone’s system clock for timers for things happening right now, typically to overcome some avoidance to doing it. Like 15 min to clean the kitchen or work on a project. Or the reverse of that - 15 min to mess around on the internet and then get back to business. I also use the system clock to wake up in the morning.

I have also used the reminders function in my phone (I’m on an iPhone, but I assume there’s something similar on android), but I find the google calendar reminders are better for me for some reason.
posted by jeoc at 8:55 AM on August 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

I use Alarmed (iOS only, sadly) for automatically-repeating medication reminders (here the "Nag Me Relentlessly" feature is very handy), "Clean House for 15 minutes" things, or timing cooking intervals when I will be out of the kitchen while something bakes, rises, marinates, etc.

When I'm working at my computer, I most often use Forest as a pomodoro timer, to block distracting websites. (Also, to plant real trees, yay!)

I also have one of these rotating digital timers for days when my concentration is really shot and I need a physical thing that makes a loud beeping noise.

In Google Calendar, I have a notification at 15 minutes before class and meetings so I can get whatever I'm doing wrapped up, and mosey over (nothing on this campus being more than 10 minutes from my office).

I always set up a "travel time" GCal event before scheduled events off-campus (or away from home, outside working hours) so I get a notification 15 minutes before I need to walk out the door. There are calendar management type-things (e.g. Clockify) that will do this automatically if you put locations in your GCal events.

I hope that's the kind of detail you were looking for.
posted by BrashTech at 8:57 AM on August 30, 2023 [5 favorites]

I use tasks in Google calendar at both work and home, in personal and work calendars, for daily, weekly, monthly etc tasks like “send gas meter reading” or “call parents”, or one off tasks, because they stick around and show up the next day and the next, until I click the little tick icon to say I’ve done it, and they are easily moveable if I inevitably don’t do the thing when I thought I would.

For really important meetings (or just any work meetings really) I link my work calendar to Slack, so I get the 10 minute before notification from my calendar on my phone which means “get ready for the meeting, go make a cup of tea, go to the bathroom, etc, generally start heading towards your meeting” and then 1 minute before, a Slack app notification which is somehow more noticeable, which means “literally stop whatever you are doing right now and go and sit down at your computer”.
posted by conkystconk at 3:20 PM on August 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

My housemate, who sleeps upstairs from me, sets two consecutive loud alarms about 5 minutes apart, and then adds a reminder using Alexa to tell her why it's important that she get up on time.

(...ask me how I know, sigh.)
posted by invincible summer at 8:34 PM on August 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

Set your favourite music app to play something distinctive and not in your usual taste for the cut off time; normal alarm sounds before, but something distinctive when there is no time left. Sleepy me's brain wonders why it's playing. You could start with Rick Astley and work your way down Kylie Minogue's early years, for instance; there has to be a musical genre (90s britpop, folk, rap, electroswing, country, drum n' bass) that falls outside your preferences or expectations.

Worst that happens is that you find a new musical rabbit hole...
posted by How much is that froggie in the window at 12:38 AM on August 31, 2023

I have a 7 day clock radio and clock radios in the bathrooms and kitchen because I don't have a good innate sense of time, and I like radio. Alexa is probably a great resource, I haven't used it much. I put appointments, meetings, reminders in Google calendar, with 90, 60, and 30 minute popup notifications that just have a quiet tone. Appointments work better than an alarm/ timer. I set timers for cooking and laundry. Sometimes I put in a 12 hour notification when I know I need extra time to get ready. Google has gotten better at extracting calendar information from email, so that helps. The key is to be good about getting everything in to the calendar. And to review tomorrow's calendar the evening before, set the coffee maker, which has a timer, make sure I have clothes, etc.
posted by theora55 at 1:24 AM on August 31, 2023 [1 favorite]