The Snooze Button – Or The Enemy Of Productivity

Who doesn’t know it. The alarm clock rings and all you want to do is sleep a little further. Only five minutes left. Hello oh so beloved Snooze Button. That these few moments of additional sleep don’t really help us and on the contrary only make us more tired, can be explained as follows: The alarm clock gets us (or tears us) out of our sleep phase. If we then press the Snooze button, we don’t extend this phase, but fall into a next one, from which we are torn out again a few minutes later. Whoever manages to press the button in a felt deep sleep and continue dreaming runs the risk of ignoring all the penetrating noises. The result: you oversleep.

When you finally manage to get up, take a shower and get to work, you don’t feel well-rested or able to become truly productive. After a short time on the computer, the concentration drops to the felt zero point and you forget what you were about to do because of all the tiredness.

And you already regret pressing the Snooze button in the morning. If you had simply set the alarm clock to the moment when you really have time to get up, you wouldn’t have interrupted your sleep and would definitely be fitter.

Of course, productivity at the workplace is not only related to fatigue. But I have noticed that my sleep behaviour – and the results of it – increase my motivation and thus also my productivity.

A fixed sleep rhythm is a prerequisite for me to recover properly. 7.5 hours per night are ideal – and I try to keep to them. Of course, thanks to flexible working hours, I have the advantage of being able to stay in bed one hour longer in the morning if the evening before was a little long.

My excessive compulsion to press the snooze button I have announced the fight.

The first try wasn’t so bad. I bought myself a light radio alarm clock, which should gently get me out of sleep in the morning. On those longer evenings, however, even the most motivating song and the most pleasant light didn’t manage to get me out of the land of dreams. The penetrating ringing of the additional mobile alarm clock was silenced, exactly, with the Snooze Button.

A new solution had to be found. Something that forces me to get up at the first ring of the hated alarm clock. And I actually found what I was looking for. Alarmy was the name of my rescue – an app with very special alarm possibilities. One of them, for example, is that you have to take a picture of your shower before the ringing stops. Another is scanning a QR code – which of course is best kept as far away from the bed as possible. My personal favorite? The math alarm clock. If I hate something more than getting up, it’s math. So every morning I have to struggle my way through three math tasks before the alarm clock finally calms down. After that I am definitely awake and too annoyed in the first few seconds to just turn around and go back to sleep. And so it’s now every morning, eyes open, brain cells on and off to the shower.

Since this morning routine, I have reduced my fatigue and increased my productivity in the office. For the feeling of afternoon anesthesia after a delicious lunch, I have not yet found an antidote.

What do you do to wake up in the morning? Tips, tricks and suggestions are more than welcome – maybe I will become a math genius after all and have to find a new way to get out of bed in the morning.

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