Its the simple things.

Shortcuts and automations are awesome because they let you automate repetitive tasks.

For instance, every evening before bed, I had to remember to turn on my alarm. Now, I have an automation that does it for me. It even checks my calendar to see if I’m on holiday the next day. If I am, it doesn’t turn on the alarm.

I know it’s easy to turn on your alarm manually, but why do it every day when you can automate it? In this post, I’ll show you how to create the automation. And in future posts, we’ll add more features to it.

Before we begin building the automation, let’s set up a few things.

A calendar – I’ve created a new calendar just for this automation, but you could quite easily set the calendar to an existing calendar.

An alarm. Create the named alarm for the specified time and frequency. For this example I have an alarm set to 6;00 am weekdays only, and is named Workday.

With those things done we can go ahead and start to build our Personal automation.

Before we start here’s a quick note of the differences between Personal and Home automations:

On iOS, iPadOS Personal Automations and Home Automations serve different purposes within the Shortcuts app:

Personal Automations

• Device-Specific: Triggered on your iPhone or iPad and tailored to your personal device use.

• Examples: Running a shortcut when you connect to a specific Wi-Fi network, open an app, or start a workout.

• User Interaction: Often requires confirmation (though some triggers, like NFC, can run automatically).

• Scope: Affects only the device of the user who creates it.

Home Automations

• HomeKit-Focused: Triggered by events or conditions related to your smart home setup.

• Examples: Turning on lights at sunset, running a scene when a motion sensor is triggered, or locking doors at a set time.

• No Confirmation: Runs automatically without requiring user interaction.

• Scope: Affects all devices and accessories in the HomeKit-enabled home.

In summary, Personal Automations are for actions tied to your iOS device, while Home Automations are for managing and automating HomeKit-enabled smart devices in your home.

Alright, let’s get cracking!

• Open the Shortcuts app.

• Create a new Automation, this can be done by either selecting the + symbol top right (iPhone) or selecting the Automation tab along the bottom (iPhone) and again selecting the + symbol at the top right of the screen.

• Select Create Personal Automation

• Select Time of Day

• Choose your time for the automation to run. I have set mine to daily @ 21:00 (9 pm).

• Next, we want to get our calendar event for tomorrow. 

• Search for and add Get Upcoming Events

• Ensure we are only getting 1 event (should be the default)

• Change the variable from All Calendars to your newly created calendar.

• Select the disclosure triangle and change from Any Day to Tomorrow.

Next, we want to add an if action to the automation. So if the calendar event contains a title of Holiday do A else do B

• Search for the if action and add to the automation.

• The default variable in the if action will be Upcoming Events we’ll need to change this.

• Select the variable Upcoming Events and scroll down the list of available variables and select Title

• Set the Condition variable within the if action to is not

• Then enter what you’d call your holiday calendar events. In my case, I simply call them Holiday.

Now we have the next calendar event for tomorrow and we’ve started to build the if condition, lets add some actions depending on the result of the if condition.

• Search for Alarm and add Toggle Alarm to the automation.

You will have noticed that the Alarm action has been added at the bottom of the shortcut without any connections to the above actions. Simply select and hold the action to move and place it just beneath the if action. Or you can copy and paste actions.

Also when you moved it to the if action the alarm name has automatically connected to the action above and defaulted to Upcoming Events. Select the name Upcoming Events and select Clear Variable and then you will be able to select the correct alarm name.

• Within the Toggle Alarm action select the alarm we want to toggle on if the calendar event does not have the title of Holiday. My alarm is called Workday, and make sure we set it to turn off our alarm.

• In the Otherwise section of the if command add another Toggle Alarm and set to Turn alarm workday off.

Once this is all done, your shortcut should look like this.

Run the automation with no calendar entries and see if the alarm toggles on.

Then create a calendar event for tomorrow and run again to see if the alarm is toggled off.

Once we are happy with our automation, the final step is to switch off Ask Before Running, otherwise every time the automation runs it will prompt to execute.

And we’re done. A nice simple Personal Automation that will:

1. Get tomorrows calendar events.

2. If the next calendar event has the title of Holiday, then turn off the alarm.

3. If tomorrows calendar event does not have a title of Holiday then bad news…. You’re going to get woken up.

As always, please feel free to contact me for any help or even if you have any ideas on what you’d like me to cover in future guides.