Airport Alarms
On a day when you're heading to the airport, in order to get yourself to the place where they let you on the plane at the right time, you need to remember & find out several different numbers and plug them into several formulas. This shortcut teaches Siri how to do all the math, create alarms for the right times on your phone, and email your schedule to yourself so you can reference it later. I made this shortcut to save myself from doing all of this math and it works great!
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Airport Alarms
These are all the different little bits of information you need to juggle to figure out how to be at the place where the plane is at the exact moment before it leaves:
- What time is the flight?
- How much time do you need to get ready?
- When should you wake up/start getting ready?
- At what time would you like to be reminded to leave soon?
- What time do you need to actually leave for the airport?
- How far way is the airport?
- What's traffic like today?
- Is driving faster than public transit right now?
- How much buffer time do you like to have between arriving at the airport and departing?
- When does boarding end?
Wouldn't it be nice to not have to do any of this?
How to use
How to use
The first part of the shortcut asks you questions about what's going on:
- When you download the shortcut, it will ask you to input default values for travel time to the airport, amount of time you need to get ready, how much buffer time you like to have at the airport, and when you want to be reminded to leave soon. The shortcut will save these values for you so you don't have to remember them, but you don't have to use them. You can also enter your own email address to send yourself an email later.
- Run the shortcut whenever you want to set your airport alarms. The shortcut asks for the date of the flight so you can set your alarms as far in advance as you want.
- The shortcut asks if you want to check the current travel time to the airport in order to use that number in its calculations. If you say no, you will skip ahead to step 6.
- If you say yes, the shortcut will do a search for local businesses with the word "Airport" within 100 miles, then it will present the results in a menu from which you can choose your airport.
- The shortcut will look up the current travel time for transit and driving. It will present the times in a menu that you can choose from, or you can enter your own number if you prefer. This also lets you decide if taking transit or driving will be faster (if you were leaving soon or didn't know how far away the airport was).
- Then the shortcut will let you review your default values and give you the option to enter new ones (which you might want to do depending on what's going on that day.)
- Then the shortcut will ask for the date of the flight and the departure time.
- The shortcut will take less than a second to do all the math using the values you selected.
- The shortcut will then show you the actual times you need to target to get to the airport on time:
- The date & time of the flight that you entered
- What time you need to wake up/start getting ready
- When your warning to leave soon will go off
- What time you need to actually leave
- What time you need to arrive at the airport
- At what time boarding ends
Then you can decide what to do with this information. First it asks if you want to send these times to yourself in an email; if so it sends the email automatically with no further input needed. Finally it asks if you want to create an alarm for each of the times listed above. That's it!
How it works
How it works
The shortcut asks the user for the values it needs, then it does all the math, and presents the results to the user. Then it walks the user through their options for recording the results. For each type of alarm, the shortcut presents a yes/no menu, and uses an IF statement to create the alarm if user selects "Yes".
How to get started with Shortcuts
If you have iOS 13, you already have the Shortcuts app. That means that if you're on your iPhone or iPad right now, you can just click the Download button to download a shortcut. If you're not on your phone, you can email the link to yourself to download it later.
You can can start using most shortcuts right away, unless they work with another app that you need to have installed. That will be indicated on the in the post above. Once you have downloaded a shortcut, it belongs to you and you can make any changes you like. The shortcuts I make and publish here don't send any data back to me and I don't make any money from publishing them.
Once you have download a shortcut you can choose how to run it. These are your options:
- When you want to run a shortcut, open your Shortcuts app and all the shortcuts in your library will be there to choose from. Just tap on it.
- To save the step of navigating to your Shortcuts app you can add a shortcut to your iPhone’s home screen so it’s easily accessible.
- Some shortcuts will automatically show up in your phone’s Share menu under “Shortcuts”.
- In the shortcut’s settings you can “Add to Siri” by recording a phrase that will trigger it. Later you can say “Hey Siri” followed by that phrase and Siri will run that shortcut for you.
- You can also set up shortcuts to run automatically in the Automations tab in the Shortcuts app. You can select from a good variety of triggers such as "When my wake up alarm stops" or "When I arrive at work".