Managing My Personal, Varying "Night Mode"

[98b427af]

I have a widely varying schedule, so my bedtime also varies. That makes Automagic's time-of-day triggers and conditions too limiting for me.

To solve the problem, I created a Google calendar called "Automagic" and put repeating entries in it for the various times that I'm in my personal "Night Mode":

WEEKLY
Sunday into Monday: 11:30 PM Sunday - 8:30 AM Monday
Monday into Tuesday: 10:30 PM Monday - 7:30 AM Tuesday
Tuesday into Wednesday: 10:30 PM Tuesday - 7:30 AM Wednesday
Wednesday into Thursday: 10:30 PM Wednesday - 7:30 AM Thursday
Thursday into Friday: 10:30 PM Thursday - 7:30 AM Friday
Friday into Saturday: 12:30 AM Saturday - 9:30 AM Saturday (Friday's a late night)
Saturday into Sunday: 10:30 PM Saturday - 7:30 AM Sunday

MONTHLY
2nd Tuesday into Wednesday: 11:00 PM Tuesday - 8:00 AM Wednesday
3rd Wednesday into Thursday: 11:00 PM Wednesday - 8:00 AM Thursday

All the entries are titled "Night Mode".

I created the following triggers to deal with this varying schedule:

Night Mode.xml

(3.23 KiB) Downloaded 1009 times

(The triggers that check for 5 seconds before the start/end of the calendar entry are used to turn the phone's night mode off/on so that happens before the triggers that fire exactly at the start/end. If I turn night mode off/on at exactly start/end there's a possibility that the other triggers will fire first and detect the wrong night mode state.)

All the above could be handled using AM's built-in time-of-day capabilities. Here's where this method pays off: apart from the regular schedule above, things can change day to day. If I'm going to be busy later than the regularly scheduled time, all I have to do is change the calendar entry for that day and AM just reacts as I want it to. I have flows that cover things like phone night mode on/off, notification volume off/on, wifi/mobile data/bluetooth off/on, hourly 3-minute wifi on/off, and some others.

If I had to modify my schedule in AM I would be modifying triggers and conditions all the time.

The flexibility and simplicity of merely having to change the calendar entry times are really nice. Also, now that the "Automagic" calendar exists I can use the same method to handle other, similar things by adding new entries with different names to that calendar and quickly setting up triggers for them by copying the ones I already have.

The only thing missing is an Automagic trigger to fire when the phone's night mode state changes, like AM can do for wifi and other things. That would eliminate the need to use the calendar event trigger to fire flows for night mode off/on. So consider this a request for that addition, too.

Thanks, and I hope this is helpful to other users.

[cjrademaker]

This is a very interesting concept. It opens a lot of possibilities, especially in terms of making highly personalized flows much more easily sharable. Changing the trigger times of certain flows so easily is also an very powerful tool.

Thanks for sharing a great idea. I am sure I will be incorperating it into my flows soon.