Health

Using a Fitbit as a Silent Alarm Clock

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How to wake up without disturbing your partner

“But whether I retire to bed early or late, I rise with the sun.”
– Thomas Jefferson to Dr. Vine Utley, 21 March 1819

I’d love to live in a situation where my wife and I could both go to sleep and rise with the sun without the need for an alarm and disturbing each other. Alas my life right now simply doesn’t allow for that.

We have a bright light right outside of our apartment window so we try and keep the room as dark as possible and I like to get up early and exercise before work and my wife likes to stay up late and sleep in. This can cause a bit of problems when an alarm starts blasting as early as 3am sometimes. It’s a horrible way to wake up and not entirely fair to your partner that is still sleeping.

I have the Fitbit Flex wristband fitness tracker and while I love the “quantified self” capabilities of its activity tracking that can help you to stay active and meet your goals, the best feature I’ve found is its silent alarm.

You wake up slowly with three vibrations on your wrist that you can then turn off by tapping twice on the device.

The beauty of putting an alarm in a activity tracker is that it knows if you’ve got up and started moving about or not.

I have a fairly regular schedule so I set my recurring alarms for the week and voila! I don’t have to think about it again. You can also use it for reminders throughout the day without having an obnoxious alarm go off in the office (I use it to remind me to stretch). It stays on my wrist all day, can be showered with and has only needed one charge in the last fortnight!

The idea is genius and (until I can just sleep at will or have screaming kids wake me up) I can’t imagine waking up another way.

-- Luke 04/13/16

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