Shake Your Phone

Why it works

Shaking is the most physical thing you can do without leaving the bed, and that is both its weakness and the reason it belongs here. It will not get you standing. It will absolutely get your arm, shoulder and heart rate involved, and by shake number forty most people are annoyed enough to stay up out of spite.

The counting comes from the motion sensors, sampled sixty times a second, measuring acceleration in every direction at once with gravity stripped out. A phone lying still reads close to zero. A deliberate shake spikes to two, three, sometimes four G. A shake counts when the reading crosses one point eight, a number picked to sit above a resting hand and below a lazy swing, and there is a lockout of roughly a fifth of a second afterwards, since one back and forth motion would otherwise be counted twice and the whole number would be a lie.

There is no escape button on this mission, mostly because there is nothing to go wrong. No camera, no permission prompt, no calibration, no lighting. It works under a duvet, in a hotel room, at somebody else’s house, on a phone with a cracked screen. That makes it worth keeping enabled as the backup for mornings when the fussier missions would fall over.

Who it’s for

Shake is a sensible entry point if you have never used an alarm that fights back and you are not ready to be filmed doing push-ups at dawn. It is also the polite option for shared rooms, being silent and needing no floor space. Set it higher than feels necessary, because fifty stops being a challenge after about a week. Pairing it with something harsher keeps you guessing, since the alarm picks one of your enabled missions at random.