Mornings have a way of going from "five more minutes" to "why am I already late?" pretty quickly. A lot of that comes down to small things stacking up before you've even had coffee: notifications piling up before you're even out of bed, a to-do list you haven't looked at yet, a short night catching up with you by mid-morning.
IFTTT (If This Then That) connects the apps, devices, and services you already use so they can work together automatically. Describe what you want to happen in a prompt, and IFTTT turns it into an automation, so the small stuff doesn't have to be done manually every morning.
Get inspired by these ten prompts to help make your mornings a little calmer.
Type one into IFTTT and try it today.
1. Start your morning with some good news
"Every morning, send me a digest of good news from my favorite RSS feed."
Skip the doomscrolling. Pick any RSS feed, a good news outlet, a slow journalism newsletter, even a hobby blog, and get everything new from it bundled into a single digest email at whatever hour works for you. One inbox visit does the job instead of a handful of open tabs before your coffee's ready.
2. Wake up to your favorite music
"Every morning, play my favorite song on my Android phone."
Skip the alarm tone you've grown to dread. Set a song and a time, and your phone starts playing it on its own. You still have to get up. At least the sound is one you picked.
3. Ease back into your notifications
"Every morning at 8AM, turn my Android ringer back up to 80%."
If you silence your phone overnight, someone has to remember to turn the sound back on, and that someone is groggy, half-dressed you. Set a time and a volume, and it happens on its own. You stop being the reason you missed a call.
4. Keep your day in one place
"Add every new Todoist task to my Google Calendar automatically."
Your task list and your calendar don't have to live in two separate apps. This adds a calendar entry the moment you create a task in Todoist, so when you open your calendar in the morning, everything you need to do sits right alongside everything you have to be at. One place to check before the day gets going, not two.
5. Have your coffee ready when you are
"Every weekday at 7AM, turn on my coffee machine."
For a lot of people, coffee is already a morning ritual. Automating the first step means one less thing to think about while you're still waking up.
6. Give yourself extra time after a short night
"When Oura logs a night under 6 hours of sleep, block 30 minutes on my Google Calendar starting half an hour after I wake up."
Not every night goes as planned. When Oura catches a short one, this blocks a recovery window on your calendar starting 30 minutes after you wake up, so the morning has a little room built in before the first meeting lands. The sleep threshold, the offset, and the length of the buffer are all yours to adjust before you turn it on.
7. Make time to journal
"Every morning, create a new Day One journal entry and remind me to write."
A calmer morning can be about more than getting things done. Give yourself a few minutes to write, reflect, or just get your thoughts out before the rest of the day takes over.
8. Start the day with a poem
"Every morning, send me a new poem."
Not every automation needs to be practical. This one asks Gemini to pick a real poem, a different one each time, and delivers it as a notification. A small reason to pause before the rest of the day starts.
9. Stop tripping your own alarm
"Every morning at 7AM, disarm my Blink system."
If you've got a Blink system, it treats you the same as any stranger walking through the kitchen at 7AM. This turns it off before you're up, so you're not reaching for an app first thing, or hearing your own alarm go off because you got up for coffee.
10. Decide dinner before you've left for breakfast
"List your ingredients in the Note widget, and Claude emails a recipe"
Add the Note widget to your home screen. When you've got half a bag of spinach and three eggs and nothing else, type that in, and Claude turns it into a recipe you can actually cook, sent straight to your inbox.
One prompt, one calmer morning
Ten prompts is a lot to take in at once, and you don't need all of them running by tomorrow. Turn on the one that fixes today's actual problem: the notification pile you can't get ahead of, the sleep that keeps throwing off your week, the five minutes you keep meaning to spend journaling.
Turn it into an IFTTT automation, and the rest will still be here when you're ready for them.
