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:

  1. What time is the flight?
  2. How much time do you need to get ready?
  3. When should you wake up/start getting ready?
  4. At what time would you like to be reminded to leave soon?
  5. What time do you need to actually leave for the airport?
  6. How far way is the airport?
  7. What's traffic like today?
  8. Is driving faster than public transit right now?
  9. How much buffer time do you like to have between arriving at the airport and departing? 
  10. When does boarding end?

Wouldn't it be nice to not have to do any of this?

How to use

The first part of the shortcut asks you questions about what's going on:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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).
  6. 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.)
  7. Then the shortcut will ask for the date of the flight and the departure time.
  8. The shortcut will take less than a second to do all the math using the values you selected.
  9. The shortcut will then show you the actual times you need to target to get to the airport on time:

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

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".

Download