More Than a Reminder: Alarms and Everyday Life

The smartphone alarm app is one of the most used applications in the world, yet HCI research has paid relatively little attention to how people actually use it beyond the canonical wake-up. The smartphone has substantially extended the alarm’s reach – making it a portable instrument for shaping attention, structuring tasks, and disciplining a future self. Drawing on a survey of 70 participants and 15 in-depth interviews, this paper documents how participants used alarms as a tool to support intention offloading, artfully adopting its simple structure to initiate, structure and end future activity. Participants talked about alarms as a way of disciplining their future self – an attempt to force oneself to attend to some task, even if the later self might be resistant. In our discussion, we develop two readings of this practice: alarms as cognitive offloading and alarms as a ‘technology of the self’, and we use the tension between these to mount a critique of the meta-cognitive framework that has dominated recent treatments of reminder use. We close by exploring how alarms could be re-designed to maintain their power as a ‘tough friend’ while supporting new collaborative and less-stressful practices.