Now see, I still use my handy Casio digital-wristwatch alarm for that.
I find most alarms to be panic-inducingly obnoxious. They hit the same button in my brain as fire alarms – I sit bolt upright with my heart pounding, convinced that it’s some kind of emergency and the house is falling down around me. (Fire drills in the dorms were fun. I was so wobbly I nearly fell down the stairs more than once.) I can set the phone to vibrate and shove it into my pillowcase, which is annoying enough to wake me, but not harsh enough to start my day off with adrenaline. The piezoelectric trill on my DS Lite works similarly.
Oh, I know that. But I also know that every single boss I’ve had who was likely to try and recall me fifteen minutes after leaving work was also the kind of person who assumes an instant jump to “out of reach or disconnected” message means the phone company is to blame, whereas a “connected” tone and eventual answering service means I’m ignoring him (the possibility that I might be in the toilet doesn’t occur to them).
So the best way to ignore him is by hitting that red button. Gosh, reception in my house is just soooo bad!
The alarm app I use has a feature called quiet at night that allows me to leave the phone on but it emits no sounds etc between the times I set for curfew and resume, except the sound of the alarm. So from 10:30 until 8:30 I get no calls or notifications but the alarm goes off at 7:30.
There are 3 big advantages of using a smartphone as an alarm.
- You have it with you
- When you set the alarm it tells you something like “The alarm is set for 8 hours and 23 minutes from now.” At least my Android does. No confusion between AM/PM.
- You can pick whatever wake-up sound/music you want. Moonlight Sonata, birds chirping, your favorite song, etc.
I have an Android tablet by my bed that does nothing but be my alarm clock Monday through Friday. Its great.
Add to the list automatic daylight saving time adjustment, automatic time zone recognition during travel.
I myself am a birds chirping kind of guy. The alarm is just a slightly more raucous version of the actual birds in the tree outside my bedroom.
Better yet…
set it to wake you up at 6 on Monday, Wednesday and Friday so you can get to the gym before work, and 7 on Tuesday, and 8 on Thursday when you work from home and don’t need to be up as early.
Set birdsong for your wake-up alarm, but a trill 10 minutes before you need to be out the door so you don’t lose track of time (I do this for my kids. They go double speed after the “ten minutes until we have to leave” alarm sounds, and run out when the “time to go” chime goes off).
Choose if snooze is permitted, how many times and at what interval.
My Casio watch has a snooze alarm, dagnabbit!
You have to train him. Turn off the ringer and then check in with voice mails at your leisure. After a while he’ll figure it out. If he’s trainable. Which he may not be. Some people aren’t.
To slightly rephrase a beloved saying: “An erroneous assumption on your part does not constitute marching orders on my part.”
I keep mine on 24/7, because I don’t really have a reason to turn it off. I also use it as an alarm and if there’s ever an emergency, I’m available.
Very true, I barely remember some of the numbers from people I regularly communicate with. It’s all in a contact list of some sort.
Not sure which device you have, but there are many smarter alarm applications out there which start at a very low volume and increase over the course of 30 seconds. They also use a song/sound which is benign enough to not be that proverbial splash of cold water, to get you up and going.
I’m just like you and I hate alarms which jolt me up, and this has worked for my partner and I. Currently using “Timely Alarm Clock” for Android.
I think Arabella Flynn was comparing yours (and hers) nice android alarms as to the average sort of alarm clocks you hear that go WEEERTWEEERTWEEERTWEEERTWEEERT in the loudest and most obnoxious way imaginable.
Those alarm clocks also wake me up with a dose of adrenaline in a bad way, and I also am now happier for the soothing tones of whatever I darn well please from my android phone as opposed to their singular screech. Which gets bonus points for working on vacations so I don’t have to deal with hotel alarm clocks in order to check out in time.
On 24/7; it’s my alarm clock and weather station. I haven’t had an emergency call but would hear it, have had a couple nuisance late night calls but they get the message pretty quickly and stop (calling 'em back very early in the morning usually helps).
I use the app “sleep cycle.” You put in a target wake up time and it senses how deep your sleep is at the time. It wakes you up gently when it detects you are not in deep sleep. Basically you place the phone on your bed next to you and it detects if you are moving.
Same with me. The main reason I have a cellphone is in case I get into a car accident; most of the time, it is in my glove compartment with the power off.
Actually, I suppose I could start carrying it around; the main reason I don’t is, I have one of those “pay as you go” plans, and it used to be something like $1 every day it was used plus 10 cents a minute, then $2 a day it was used with no per-minute charge. My new one is a flat monthly rate (in effect, it’s not so much “pas as you go” as it is “non-contract”); probably the only reason I don’t is out of fear that I’ll leave it at home.
I use my phone as an alarm clock, so it needs to be on all night.
However, I chose “other” because, while I do leave it on 24/7, I have a sleep-tracking app that automatically switches it to Airplane mode / silent mode when I tell it I’m going to sleep.
This gets rid of intrusive alerts from texts etc. when I’m trying to sleep. My beloved spouse nearly got his phone thrown out the window several times when we got an early-morning traffic alert on his phone.
Mine stays on 24/7 because - well, because it does. I charge it overnight but the charger is not in the bedroom. If it rings I won’t know until morning.
Except when traveling, when it stays by the bed and serves as my alarm clock.
On all the time. It’s a smartphone, and sometimes when I can’t sleep I grab it and check out the Dope.
It’s on 24/7. No landline.
My phone is so much more than just a phone that if I turned it off, there’s a lot of my daily and nightly routine I wouldn’t be able to do anymore. To make it accurately comparable, it’s like asking me to turn off my TV, stereo, game console, and computer, not letting me have my day planner, food journal, shopping lists, and reminders, and forgoing all the after-hours work stuff I do from home. It’s a very valuable tool in my life.