Technology can be useless or a tool. Smart speakers are no exception to this. Amazon’s Alexa platform has a pretty cool feature which could help you form new habits: Routines.
Within the Alexa app you can create routines. They are basically little programmable events which are triggered by either a word, an Echo Button or time itself. I like to imagine them as being little voice programs you can easily click together to create something like a crew member of the Enterprise would do. Wouldn’t it be cool if everyday at 7 a.m. your alarm goes of, you grab yourself a coffee and half an hour later Alexa reminds you to: 1) Clean up your place, 2) brush your teeth and 3) meditate? This actually is my “morning routine”. I’ve created it to get into the habit of a morning ritual, which starts my day with productivity and mindfulness. As long as I don’t do it automatically after waking up, I let Alexa instruct me to do so.
Of course, the content of your routines are based on whatever you wish them to be. You can easily set the time, the duration of “wait”-ing time between instructions from Alexa and even set music at the end of it. If you own light bulbs and other IoT devices, you can turn them on accordingly. Maybe you like to meditate with warm lighting. It basically is up to your imagination.
In order to give you some more ideas for your own routines, I’ll give you a list of programs I want to put together at some point:
- Work-Out timer
- Bedtime routine
- Meditation timer
In order to remind you to do stuff, you can also just ask Alexa for reminders.
(Note: This might also work with Siri, Cortana and the Google Assistant, but I don’t use any of these services and can’t provide any info on how to do it)
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