Automatically silence your Android when baby’s sleeping

It never seems to fail in the early days when your child’s sleep is easily interrupted that your phone will ring, or someone will post a comment, or you’ll get a text message and baby will go from a near passed out lump of baby goo into a screaming crying snotty mess who can’t get to sleep.

Since most of us carry our phones with us without thinking, there’re some ways to automate silencing them phone by using Android’s built-in features, or Tasker if you’re on an older version of Android or want to do amazing things.

Starting with Android 5, you could define hours for no interruptions/alarms/etc. If you’ve got a child with the same bedtime every night you can without much hassle set up a phone quiet time with interruptions only allowed from a couple of people who know not to call under penalty of death.

You can find these settings in settings, Sound & Notification, Interruptions, and what you’re looking for is “Downtime.” So if your baby goes to bed at 7pm every night you probably want a downtime of 6:45-7:30 with priority interruptions and calls/messages only from people you trust.

You can play around with the settings a bit, but make sure to test before you trust it in action.

If you want to get a little fancier you can use a program like NFC Tasks and a cheapo NFC chip (about $1-$2 depending on how many you buy,) that can set your phone to silent.

Should you want to go quite fancy you can break out Tasker, Autolocation, Autoremote, and set up that after 6:45 the phone runs completely silent when it’s within 10 feet of baby’s room. Additionally you’ll trigger a task on your deactivated Android device that will start the baby’s nighttime musical playlist, and configure a canned response to texts that says the baby is being put down.

For that you’ll need to set GPS to high precision in Autolocation which can eat up battery, sort of depends on the phone. Your house may be a bit too small for that to work though in which case you’ll need to come up with some alternate way of silencing devices near the baby’s room.

The first is probably the most practical for the new baby owner as it’s free. The NFC will probably set you back about two bucks for a quiet-chip and will require you to remember to tap it. The third is for the dedicated Tasker professional geek who wants to write the code and never have to think about everything being perfect again, this will probably run you about $10 all said and done and change your life.

In the meantime, someone texting you “s’up?” won’t ruin your 30 minutes of attempting to get your baby goo to sleep.