This is an idea that appeared to me in my dreams. Really. I’m not joking. Or maybe I thought of it as soon as I woke up this morning – in the cusp of dreams and reality, and then presently fell back asleep. Either ways, it doesn’t matter. The idea is surely mine, and not knowing how to profit from it I’m making it public.
The basic idea is that the inter-snooze interval between consecutive alarms should decrease geometrically. Currently, alarm clock apps on mobile phones have a fixed snooze duration. For example, my Moto G has a fixed snooze duration of 6 minutes (which I think i can change through settings, but will remain fixed at the new level then). The wife’s iPhone has a fixed snooze duration of 5 minutes (again customisable I believe).
However, I believe that this is illogical and makes you wake up over a longer time interval than necessary. The reasoning is that the degree of wakefulness at each alarm ring is different. When you wake up at the second ring (after you’ve snoozed it once), you’re more wakeful than you were when the alarm rang for the first time. After you’ve snoozed for the second time, you are unlikely to go into as deep sleep as you did when you snoozed it for the first time, in which case you are unlikely to go into the kind of deep sleep you were in before the first ring of the alarm clock.
By keeping the inter-snooze duration constant, what the alarm clock is doing is to give you an opportunity to go back in into the same kind of deep sleep (the longer you sleep between alarm rings, the greater the possibility that you will go back into deep sleep), which further impedes your complete waking up.
What is ideal is that the first time you get woken up from deep sleep, you struggle, snuggle and snooze, and go back to sleep. The next time you should be woken up before you’ve hit the deep sleep phase. You wake up again, struggle, snuggle and snooze, and go into shallower sleep. The next alarm ring should catch you at this shallower stage, and rouse you up. And so on.
So what I’m proposing is that the inter-snooze interval in alarm clocks should decrease geometrically. So if the first inter-snooze interval lasted five minutes, the next one should last less than that, and the one after that even less than that. Each time this interval should come down by a pre-defined fraction (let’s say half, without loss of generality). That way, even if you snooze multiple times, it ensures that you finally wake up in a time-bound fashion (beyond a point, the snooze duration becomes so small that it rings continuously until you switch off and wake up, and by then you have attained full consciousness).
So the way I want my alarm clock designed is that I define how much time I want to wake up in (let’s say default is 20 minutes), and a (harder to change) multiplicative factor by which inter-snooze times come down (default is half), and the inter-snooze interval decreases accordingly geometrically so that you wake up in exactly the time that you’ve initially specified!
So with the defaults of 20 and 1/2, the inter-snooze periods will be 10 mins, 5 mins, 2 min 30 secs, 1 min 15 secs, 37.5 secs, 18.75 secs, … by which time you should be annoyed enough to have woken up but yet wakeful enough having drifted back only just enough!
I think this is a world-changing idea, but I mention again that I don’t know how to commercialise it so putting it out in the open. If you think this works for you, thank me!
And perhaps this is a good assignment to start my career in programming mobile phone apps. Should I start with iOS or Android? (I have an android phone and an iPad).