Snooze Alarms: Tool of the Devil or Savior of Humankind?

[marcusmarcusrc]

There was a recent Tech Review article about an invention named
Clocky. Clocky is an "attempt to solve a common problem" - eg, hitting the snooze button one too many times - by rolling off your table and to some random location on the floor after you hit him, so you have to get up to find him in order to hit snooze again.

But why have snooze buttons at all? People seem totally wedded to the snooze concept but it seems to me that if I can afford to get up 15 minutes later than the time I have set my alarm for originally - why not just set my alarm for that time? I certainly don't trust myself 5 seconds after waking up to intelligently make a decision "can I afford five more minutes of sleep or do I need to get up now?", so I just assume that if my alarm goes off then I really need to get up. And then I try to set my alarm for the latest possible minute I can get away with...

Comments

[chenoameg.livejournal.com]

At this point I'm so lucky that I rarely set an alarm at all.

So for me the alarm is a mechanism for regulating my sleep cycle more than getting me to a certain place at a certain time. And sometimes the alarm comes at a startling place, so it's nice to be able to snooze it and try again in ten minutes.

So if I had an alarm clock that woke me up when I entered the proper stage of sleep within a range of times I probably wouldn't use the snooze button at all.