How To Set Your Phone Alarms & Meeting Times

 

Screen capture of home screen alphabetically showing clock under C in second row down. Photo by Angela Lansbury. Copyright.

Your mobile phone, if it's a modern smart phone, comes with a clock. If you are doing this for the first time, or showing somebody else what to do, the first action is to locate the clock symbol.

If you ask in the shop when you buy a phone, or go back, or even ask any shop or friend when they are not busy, they can show you.

First Find The Home Screen

On my Samsung phone this is the centre of the bottom of the screen.

Finding Clock Symbol

This is on the home screen, or series of screens, which can be set to display alphabetically. At the base of the home screen, are your three most used functions first. The featured items would often be phone, messaging, camera. You can go into settings and rearrange this. Setting is like a circle with cogs or indentations. 

Ssared Of Settings?

Don't be scared of settings. If you are concerned about accidentally upsetting something by clicking on, practice just looking down the list of items, moving the screen very carefully and slowly. Then change items which are not important, or practice on another phone which does not matter, or when you are not in a hurry.

Clock Choices

The clock has an alarm and a stopwatch. In the alarm, it does what you want. You can choose the time of day. Spin up the hours on the left. Make sure that you are using the 24 hour clock rightly.  If you want an alarm at 7 pm you need to set it to 19, not to 7. 

The phone helps you to check on this. When you finish, you should get a message, alarm set to (however many) hours from now.  Don't ignore this message. Double check everything. Just once in a hundred times you have set the wrong time and it will alert you. So you wake for your morning meeting, or catch your plane.

Repeating Alarms

You can set the alarm to one day, several, or all. Firstly, it is likely to pick today if the alarm is set for the same day, for an evening apointment. The intiail letters for the days of the week show this and change colour when you have chosen that day. So that every day you could be alerted to wake at 7.30 am. Or to leave at 8 am to catch a train. 

You can also set a bedtime alarm. So if you want to be asleep by midnight, you could set it at 11 to start leaving a venue, packing, or getting ready for bed. You could even set an alarm to reind yourself to set the alarm, to catch the plane on your return flight, or before landing to another time zone, or to call the taxi and tell them you have landed. 

You could set an alarm to remind yoursself to stop to buy milk on the way home after a trip away.

I can set an alarm to remind myself to write my blog post, or to finish writing it, or to load a photo. You could set an alarm to remind yourself to read my blog or send a link to your family and friends, colleagues, pupils.

Lastly, screen capture, to send somebody else the screen showing your time zone and theirs, on my Samsung mobile phone you press the lower two of the right hand strip buttons simultaneously. You hear the click. You can then go to gallery to check what you captured and send it in what's up with any text message reminding the recipient when to phone or meet you.

 

Changing the time on your watch - who to ask, how to remember

When travelling to a new time zone you need to change the time on your watch either on the plane before landing or as soon as you arrive. Nothing more annoying than being woken in the night by an alarm set for back home.

You also need to co-ordinate meetings on arrival. Yes, you can use the phone on your watch or kitchen clock at the destination if it re-sets itself to local time. But if not that message to see you in two hours time, leaves you puzzled when your watch said one time and the local clocks say another, so now you are so confused you can't remember the time you spoke.

Some people set the new time by the destination time on the screen in the aeroplane immediately on boarding. You can adjust your bedtime in the previous week by an hour a day (with afternoon naps lying down or catnaps sitting at your desk with your eyes closed. That could help re-set your body clock.

CHANGING YOUR WATCH
The next problem  to solve is re-setting your watch. It has four buttons to push. On my last trip I thought, surely any intelligent traveller sitting beside me or nearby will know what to do.

They didn't. I said, 'surely all watches are similar. Only four buttons.'

(I'd previously successfully changed a watch using the instructions I found on my kitchen-office pinboard at home. I had succeeded, even though the instructions were for a different watch.)

My tame statistician told me, 'No. You have four buttons, sixteen combinations, and three ways of pressing each button, once, twice or three times.

Fortunately my tame scientist found the answer on the internet from instructions for a similar watch.

The way to remember how your watch works is:

Ask the shop to change it when you buy it. Video the instructions from the shop assistant. Do it yourself to enforce the message. Try it a second time. Then explain it to two other people. Make a video of yourself explaining it.

Change it to your destination time and back every morning for a week until it's a habit and something you can do fast. Find a willing audience. Child, blog. That will be a subject for my later post. How to change the time on your watch.

if you can find the manufacture and model, bookmark that on line. You could also write the instructions in your diary for the first and last day of each trip if you keep a journal. Start a Facebook page for your device. Ask for or give instructions.

Keep a file of travel information for your destination, including the instructions for changing your watch time.

Angela Lansbury, BA, travel writer and photographer, author, speaker.
Author of How To Get Out Of The Mess You're In.