Improve your iPhone's bedside manner with this quick Do Not Disturb tip

Two weeks ago I wrote a ranty editorial on iMore in regards to the areas where I personally find the iPhone's features are lacking while I'm in bed catching zzzzz's. If you missed it, it's worth reading. It got a huge response and sparked an amazing community discussion. And I'm extremely glad I wrote post, as in the comments a suggestion was given by an iMore member that's proven to be a great band-aid fix for my biggest pet peeve.

What Was Driving Me Nuts

Here's the quick recap:

I really feel there should be an option for me to enable, that allows Do Not Disturb to be turned on and off automatically when I plug in the phone to charge at night.

Within Settings > Do Not Disturb, you *can* set the Schedule for DND to turn on and off automatically. However, unless you go to bed and wake up in the morning at the exact same time every single day —weekends included — you're not going to use it. It's far too time consuming to do this every night.

So instead of using this setting, I simply turn on DND and turn it off manually. I swipe up from the bottom of the phone to bring up Control Center, at which point I tap the moon icon and DND turns on. Hopefully, in the morning, once I wake up, I remember to then turn DND off. It's habit now, but for many weeks I would forget to turn DND off and go half the day before realizing it, missing all the beeps, buzzes, and other alerts just when I need them the most.

What should happen is this: On Settings > Do Not Disturb, there needs to be an option that I can enable that allows me to enter Do Not Disturb mode automatically while the phone is charging. As an extra layer of control, this is where the hours schedule would be handy. I could set it from 10:30pm to 8am. In other words, if I plug my phone into a charger between those hours, it's almost 100% likely that I'm in bed. However, if it's 11:30pm and my phone is still not on the charger, that means I'm awake and don't want DND turning on automatically.

While there was a lot of agreement with my peeve and I do think there is much room to improve this feature in a future iOS update, the following solution has worked well.

The Band-Aid Solution

Here's the solution that iMore member Ewan Logan suggested:

There is a simple work-around for your do not disturb woes:

1. Set automatic DND from some time when you will definitely be asleep, (e.g. 2am) until when you will be awake (e.g. 8am).

2. When you actually go to sleep (e.g. 11pm), manually turn on Do Not Disturb.

3. Do Not Disturb will autmatically turn off at 8am as configured.

Not perfect, but at least you don't have to remember to turn it off in the morning.

Following Ewan's advice, I set my Do Not Disturb schedule from 1:00am to 5:45am. During the week, my alarm clock is set to go off at 5:45am. My biggest issue before was that when I manually turned on DND, I'd often forget to turn it off. This takes care of that.

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As for going to sleep, I'm typically (during the week) in bed before 1:00am. And when I'm going to bed I don't forget to turn on DND, as it's part of my routine. Plug in phone to charge, swipe up on control center and tap the moon icon. And in the case I do forget to turn on DND, it will automatically kick in at 1am so the most important hours of my sleeping period go without disturbance.

That's all there is to it. Props to Ewan for the suggestion. That said, I still want Apple to fix their stuff.

 

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