Automating Display settings?

[ckuttner]

OK....I'm a newbie to Shortcuts and Automator, and may be missing the obvious:

I am a physician and have my Apple Watch 6 and iPhone 8 not going to Do Not Disturb at night, as I have to be available for calls (which are, fortunately, rare).

Each bedtime, I go to Settings on my AW6 and go to Display & Brightness, turning Brightness all the way down, and Always On to Off.
Each morning, I reverse that process. It would be great if my AW6 would do that without my having to mess with it.

For all its failings, my Fitbit Versa does just fine with such a schedule. How would I go about setting up a schedule like this for my AW6, please?

 

[TommyBG86]

What if you customize the sleep mode? You can set to allow all calls but the display will disable on your watch. Also you can set a time or enable manually.

 

[ckuttner]

Wow....so far, this seems like a good approach. I still find Focus one of the most confusing Apple bits in my 30+ years of using Apple products.
However, Sleep used to happen before I disabled it. It has a feature called Sleep Screen that still leaves the display on constantly, not so nice when I'm in bed.

 

[TommyBG86]

The approach is good but the implementation is not really practical for everyone but this can be improved.

 

[BigBlur]

You can do this with an automation in Shortcuts. Here's what mine looks like that turns 'Aways On' on at 8 AM. I have a similar one that turns it off at 11 PM. It works pretty slick. You can't automatically set the brightness though, but there are other cool options like changing the watch face, or setting the silent mode.

Open the Shortcuts app, and go to the Automation tab at the bottom. Click the + button and choose 'Create Personal Automation'. Select what you want your trigger to be (time of day, focus, etc.), and then add the 'Always On' action.

 

[Night Spring]

You can't automatically set the brightness though, but there are other cool options like changing the watch face, or setting the silent mode.

Yes, it's a bummer that there is no automation to set the brightness level, but you can create a dark watch face, then make an automation to switch to that face at bedtime. Then you make another automation to switch back to a regular watch face in the morning.

 

[Significant1]

Wow....so far, this seems like a good approach. I still find Focus one of the most confusing Apple bits in my 30+ years of using Apple products.
However, Sleep used to happen before I disabled it. It has a feature called Sleep Screen that still leaves the display on constantly, not so nice when I'm in bed.

That is not how it works here on my s7. The screen is off when sleep focus is active. I have sleepscreen activated in watch app->sleep if that makes any difference.

But i agree that focus is overly complicated and especially sleep focus, with settings spread across settings, health, watch and clock.

 

[ckuttner]

Yes, it's a bummer that there is no automation to set the brightness level, but you can create a dark watch face, then make an automation to switch to that face at bedtime. Then you make another automation to switch back to a regular watch face in the morning.

I finally monkeyed around with this (or perhaps 'gorillas') and wow...not only am I grateful to get these functions running, but to achieve a beginning comfort with Automation.

Seems a lot easier than my old days of punching cards for my Fortran IV programs back when our watches ticked and cars didn't have chips in them anywhere other than the paint!