If you’re anything like me, watching shows in bed at the end of a long day is a great way to wind down.
But when I’m on and Netflix is still running—sometimes for hours—it’s a pain the next day trying to find my seat again. Some apps have built-in sleep timers, but many (like Netflix) still don’t.
I had a new baby six months ago and I also have a two year old, so it’s safe to say that I’m pretty exhausted at the end of most days. Last thing at night, I’ll feed my baby (watching a show on my iPad, propped up on my nightstand), then lie down for a bit and wait for her to fall asleep and for me to get some much needed shut-eye too.
As you can imagine, it doesn’t actually take me that long to fall asleep, but I do like the comfort of the screen playing while I drift off. However, after consistently falling asleep within 10-20 minutes, but finding that my shows continued to play for hours on end, I went looking for a solution.
Find the sleep timer
It’s not an obvious option, so you’d be forgiven for missing this. Go to your device’s Clock appand press timers setting. I’m sure you’ve used this for other things, like cooking or as a reminder to do something.
Press on ‘When the timer ends’ and scroll all the way to the bottom past all the ringtone options and you will see ‘Stop playing’ is listed.
Tap this and when your timer ends, your Netflix show (or other streaming service) will stop and your iPad/iPhone will lock. You will have to press ‘Set’ the first time you do it – you’ll know if you’ve done it right because when you go back to the main timer screen it will say ‘Stop Playing’ next to ‘When Timer Ends’ now.
Depending on how sleepy I am, I set the timer for anything between 5 and 20 minutes – I usually have a pretty good idea of how long I need. So the next day when I come back to watch/listen to the show again, I know I only want a maximum of the timer setting to rewind to continue playing where I left off.
Until I get a device that recognizes exactly when my eyes are closed, this is the next best thing.
More timer adjustments
A few more timer adjustments can help make your life easier. A quick way to toggle between different alarm lengths – say you want 5 minutes one night, 20 minutes another night and 10 minutes another – is to use ‘Latest’.
Scroll past the ‘When Timer Ends’ section and you should see a list of all your recently used alarms. Now you can just tap the one I want without having to adjust the timer at the top. Precious seconds saved!
This is also useful if you use the timer for other things during the day, such as while cooking. I have labeled my timers ‘Bedtime’ to ensure it is set to ‘Stop Playing’ function. You can set a label when you initially create a timer, change it from ‘Timer’ to whatever you want.
Control Center and Siri
You can also make use of Control Center and Siri – the latter is quite useful if you need to keep yourself free, perhaps if your iPad is resting on a cabinet just out of reach.
For Control Center – which is the set of options that appear when you swipe down from the top-right corner – you can add a timer control here. After swiping down, tap and hold on an empty area of the screen and tap ‘Add a control’ and find Timer in the list of options.
Once it’s added, you have two options. Tap once and you’ll be taken to the regular timer settings, but you can also tap and hold the timer icon and then swipe up and down the screen to add or remove time – a bit like adding or reducing torch brightness. Note, with this you must have already had your timer set to ‘Stop Playback’ before.
Finally, you can of course also use Siri. Either hold the Side/Home button or say “Hey Siri” followed by “set a 10 minute sleep Timer” to enable the “Stop Playing” feature. Be sure to include the word “Sleep” before the Timer or you’ll get a rude awakening when it goes off.
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