Reliable Meditation Timer With iOS Shortcuts

TL;DR: I found app-based meditation timers unreliable, so I created my own with iOS shortcuts. For extra fun, it reads out a mindfulness quote using an extra shortcut.

Timer Anxiety

“Did the timer die again?” That’s the question that popped into my consciousness 28 minutes into my 20-minute meditation. And with that thought came the tinge of anxiety — “I only had 20 minutes, I’ll be late for my meeting if it’s dead”. This is a perfect challenge to apply my skills, I thought — just meditate on that anxiety! It turned out to be a productive meditation session.

I was also ridiculously late for that meeting.

While I appreciated the potency of “timer anxiety” as an object of meditation, it started disrupting my practice. Every meditation timer app I’ve tried (Oak, Insight Timer, Headspace, etc.) mysteriously stopped my timer on a regular basis. To make things worse, I’d often forget to set my phone to Do Not Disturb and get inundated with notifications (I guess those can be meditation objects too).

Here’s my guess as to what was happening:

1. Some timers often use custom starting and ending bells, so the app and the system treat it as a piece of media. So instead of a 20-minute timer, it’s a 20-minute (mostly silent) track. Unbeknown to me, these tracks would pause if my AirPods thought they were out of my ears (they weren’t) or due to some other rogue system event.
2. The apps that do actually set timers or alarms often don't seem to have privileges to override Do Not Disturb and/or silent mode. So, sometimes, the timer would run out and make no sound.

Shortcut to Nirvana

After a while, I switched to using the native timer app. Since it’s a system app, it was much more reliable and didn’t suffer from the same issues. And after Apple beefed up the Shortcuts app in iOS 15, I realized I could package all my actions into a single neat shortcut.

Here’s how it works:

1. It starts by asking you how long you want to meditate. I added three preset lengths I often use and a custom option to input your own length.
2. It sets the volume to 85% to make sure you can always hear the timer.
3. It sets the device to Do Not Disturb for the timer's duration only.
4. It then asks you if you’d like to hear a mindfulness quote. If you say yes, it reads out a random quote from your google sheet. Read on for more details on this one.
5. It waits 20 seconds to give you time to get comfortable and put away your phone.
6. It starts the timer for the specified duration. Pick a timer sound that you don’t find jarring (mine is “Harp”).
7. It plays a meditation bell to let you know the timer has started.
8. It logs your “mindfulness minutes” into the Health app. I use a habit tracker called Streaks that automatically marks my meditation habit as complete based on mindful minutes.

You can grab the shortcut here and customize it to your liking. Another benefit of using shortcuts is simple widgets for quicker access.

I built my practice on the back of many amazing books, so I added the random quote to remind myself about my motivation for meditating. Here’s how to make it work:

1. Import your favorite quotes (I imported mine from Kindle) into a google sheet. I pasted them all as plaintext into column A.
2. Publish that google sheet to the web.
3. Create an API key in the google cloud console.
4. Paste your API key into the shortcut where it asks for your key. Don’t share your key (or the shortcut with the key in it) publicly.
5. Add the number of rows you have in the sheet into the shortcut where it asks for it.
6. Enjoy the infinite wisdom in the robotic Siri voice (you can pick the exact voice / speed / etc.)

If you’re still having troubles with the API call, this is the Stackoverflow post that helped me nail it down. You can also remove that part from the timer shortcut entirely if you don’t find it valuable.

I’ve been using this shortcut for many months, and I can confidently say that timer anxiety is gone (although still working on other anxieties…). Let me know if you find this helpful or make any improvements!