Three Ways to Set an iPhone Alarm Without Waking Your Partner

Life can get stressful when you and your partner have different schedules. If you need to rise at 4 a.m. to make it to work on time, and your partner has an afternoon shift, you risk waking them up early alongside you. But technology now allows us to have better solutions to this problem—and here are three of the best.

You can stop your iPhone’s alarm from playing via its speakers by setting up this automation: Download Apple’s Shortcuts app and open it. Go to the Automation tab, located at the bottom of the screen, and select Create Personal Automation.

On the next page, select Alarm, and then select the following options:

This will let you select an existing alarm, such as the 4 a.m. alarm that wakes you every morning, and ensure that the automation runs only when that specific alarm goes off. Tap Next, and look for Play Music using the search bar and select it. You can tap Music to select any song you like as your alarm tone, and tap Done. This finishes configuring your automation.

There’s just one more step to make the alarm ring only through your headphones. Open the Clock app on your iPhone, and tap the alarm you selected for the automation. Under Sound, select None. The next time you go to sleep, you can connect your favorite pair of headphones to your iPhone, and wear them to bed. When the alarm goes off, you’ll hear the sound only through the headphones, and not through the speaker.

This automation works by triggering automatic music playback when the alarm goes off, and it’ll run efficiently as long as your phone doesn’t run out of battery. Of course, if you’re someone who tosses and turns a lot, and your headphones fall off, you may not hear the alarm—ideally, you should use a pair of headphones that are comfortable to wear while sleeping and don’t fall out of your ears easily.

If you set up a sleep schedule on your iPhone, your Apple Watch will use haptics to gently wake you every morning, and you won’t have to disturb your partner at all. You can set this up by going to the Health app on your iPhone and navigating to the Browse tab in the bottom-right corner, and selecting Sleep. Once you set up a schedule and enable the alarm, you just have to ensure your Apple Watch is adequately charged and that you’re wearing it to bed. One last thing: Put the Apple Watch in silent mode because if you don’t, it will ring.

You always have the option of setting up alarms on your Apple Watch or other fitness trackers. Even the most basic and affordable ones let you set alarms and will vibrate gently to wake you at the scheduled time. If you’ve never used one of these products, you could consider getting a cheap fitness tracker just for vibrating alarms.

[Matthew Cassinelli]