7 automations for people who hate mornings

Nobody's at their best before 9AM. You know this. Your coffee knows this. The pile of clothes you threw on the floor last night because "you'll deal with it in the morning" definitely knows this.

And yet somehow, mornings keep showing up whether you're ready for them or not.

So if you can't stop them, you might as well make them less painful. That's where IFTTT comes in. It connects to over 1000 apps and devices so your morning basically runs itself while you're still convincing yourself to get out of bed.

Here are seven automations that will give you your mornings back.

1. Let your room wake you up instead of your alarm

There's a version of waking up where you don't feel ambushed. Where your body has a moment to ease into consciousness before the day starts throwing things at you.

If you have Philips Hue, your lights can shift to a warm sunrise glow at whatever time you set, gradually brightening until your room actually feels like morning.

LIFX bulbs work the same way, fading on slowly over a duration you choose, so there's no harsh transition between asleep and frantically awake.

Either way, pair it with a softer alarm and you might actually stop dreading the moment your eyes open.

2. Coffee before you even leave the bed

Imagine walking into your kitchen and your coffee is already brewing, purely because you tapped a button on your phone while you were still horizontal.

If you wake up at the same time every day, you can skip the tap entirely and have your Home Connect Coffee Machine turn on automatically on a set schedule. If your mornings are a bit more unpredictable, the Button widget on your home screen gives you one-tap control so you can fire it up whenever you actually crawl out of bed.

Either way, you'll never stand around waiting for coffee again.

3. Know the weather before you open a single app

You already know how this goes. You open the weather app, somehow end up on Instagram, and ten minutes later you still don't know if you need a jacket.

A morning notification with your Weather Underground forecast cuts that whole loop short, temperature, conditions, done, move on.

If you'd rather see the weather alongside your day's schedule, you can have it added directly to Google Calendar each morning instead, so one glance at your day tells you everything you need to know before you leave the house.

4. Stay informed without losing an hour to it

Keeping up with the news sounds like a great habit until it means opening Twitter for "five minutes" and surfacing an hour later, somehow more stressed and less informed.

The fix is getting the good stuff delivered to you instead. Save a random Wikipedia article to Feedly daily for a knowledge boost, or automatically save trending New York Times articles straight to Instapaper so today's top stories are always ready to read later.

5. Never lose track of what you need to do

Between iOS Reminders, Google Calendar, and whatever else you use to stay organized, there's a good chance your to-dos and schedule are scattered across more places than you'd like.

A daily email digest that compiles every new iOS Reminder you've added throughout the day is a surprisingly tidy fix: instead of notifications you swiped away and forgot, everything lands in one place each morning.

On the calendar side, a weekly summary email of all new Google Calendar events keeps you across what's coming up without having to open your calendar every five minutes to check.

6. Actually build the habits you keep putting off

The morning rush is where good intentions go to die. You meant to check your to-do list, you meant to plan your day, but somehow you're already late and your coffee is cold.

If you use iOS Reminders, any new reminder — including ones added with Siri — gets automatically synced to your Notion To-Do list so all your tasks live in one place without ever switching apps. Just tell Siri your task and it appears in Notion, ready for action.

Prefer to schedule on the fly? Type a quick note through the Note widget and it instantly becomes a Google Calendar event with the correct date and time. The structure is already there, all you have to do is fill it in.

7. Block distractions before your brain even has a chance

You sit down, you open your laptop, you think "I'll just check one thing quickly," and forty minutes later you're reading about a drama you don't even care about.

With a single tap of the Button widget, this applet creates a one-hour Do Not Disturb block directly in your Google Calendar so your morning focus time is protected before the chaos even starts.

And if you're jumping into a meeting, your Android device will automatically mute itself the moment your Google Calendar event begins.

Pick one, try it this week

You don't need to set up everything here today. Just pick whichever one would make the biggest difference to your morning right now and start there.

Most of these take under two minutes to set up in IFTTT. No code, no complicated settings.

Your morning's not going to fix itself. But with a little help, it can at least stop being the worst part of your day.

Try IFTTT free and start automating your mornings today.