Fining myself for snoozing alarms

Tuesday. September 24, 2019 - 3 mins read

With Apples new iOS 13 release comes the much-hyped Shortcut automations, that let you run shortcuts based on a number of triggers.

This got me thinking about what I could use and after reading a few posts in the Monzo Community Forum I decided to try my hand at creating a shortcut that would run automatically whenever I snoozed my alarm in the morning and transfer £1 to a designated pot in my Monzo accocunt. This post details how I set it up.

Creating an IFTTT webhook

First steps first, you’ll need to create a webhook on IFTTT, which is just a fancy term for having IFTTT give you a convenient URL that runs a specific action whenever you open said URL. This’ll come in handy, because it so happens that the Shortcut app is capable of opening a URL as an action. So, how do you create a webhook?

Navigate to ifttt.com and sign in.
Press explore in the top right and press the plus button next to “Make your own applets from scratch”
Press the “+This” text, search and open the “Webhooks” service in the “Choose a Service” page.
Select the “Receive a web request” option and give it an informative name, like alarm_snoozed and create it.
Press the “That” text and search/select Monzo. Choose “Move money into a pot”.
Choose the pot that’ll hold your fines in the dropdown along with the amount you want to fine yourself.
Create your action!
On your home page, open the “Webhooks” service and press documentation, located on the top right.
Take note of your key, located on the top.

Creating a Shortcut - way 1

You’ll need to ensure that you’re on iOS 13.1 to be able to do this. Open your settings app, find the “Shortcuts” setting page and enable “Allow Untruusted Shortcuts”.

Open this link: https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/3fc2b776e5944b2f852fd79ca4b2db52 on your phone and press “Get Shortcut”.
Press “Add Untrusted Shortcut” and enter your IFTTT trigger and IFTTT key when asked.
Open the Automation tab and press the plus button, pressing “Create Personal Automation”.
Press “Alarm” under “Time of Day” and select “Is Snoozed” along with a specific alarm if you want.
Press next and then press “Add Action”, then “Apps”, then select the Shortcut app and press “Run Shortcut”
Select “Shortcut” and choose the “Monzo Snooze Fine” shortcut.
Press Next, toggle “Ask Before Running” off and press Done.

You’re all done!

Creating a Shortcut - way 2

If you don’t want to enable untrusted shortcut settings and would rather makae it from scratch, this is how:

In shortcuts, press the plus button to create a new shortcut.
Press “Add action”, select “Web” and then press “Get Contents of URL”
Enter “https://maker.ifttt.com/trigger/YOUR-TRIGGER/with/key/YOUR-KEY” replaceing the bits in bold with the relevant stuff.
Press “Done” and name your shortcut something descriptive, like “Monzo Snooze Fine” then follow steps 3-7 in Way 1.

You’re all done!

Future work

Make the shortcut send in specific values that you can use to set the fine. One quirky thing I want to try is fining an amount equivalent to the time of snooze, so if I snooze at 7:15 it’ll fine me £7.15. This can be done by passing in some JSON when sending a request to the URL, which IFTTT can then use to pass along to Monzo for the pot transfer.

Zain Patel

Software Engineer @ QB \\ Maths @ Cambridge