Being lazy is hard work

Henry notes a potential solution to a serious problem at lifehacker:

The Procrastinator’s Clock is set ahead for a random amount of time from 0 to 15 minutes – which means you don’t know if and how much it’s set ahead, so you treat the possibly later time as if it’s actual. Of course, with the correct time in your system tray, it’s not hard to just check yourself, but with auto-hide enabled…. The Procrastinator’s Clock is available for Mac or Windows, or you can try it in an browser window direct from the web.

The problem, of course, is the existence of watches and cell phones. I’d need all of them to have the same function to make this work.

I’ve actually invented a low-tech version of this for alarm clocks. Every night, just before I go to sleep I set the time on my alarm clock to be somewhere between 10 and 30 minutes fast. I do this when I’m very tired, and I try to pay as little attention as possible to just how far ahead I set it. Then, I set my alarm for when I need to get up. I know I have time for one snooze alarm, because I can’t reasonably expect to get up without at least one snooze. But anything beyond that is a risk, as I don’t know how much time I’ve actually got. The problem is my cell phone–if it’s in the bedroom, I’m prone to get up and look at it, to see if I’ve got more time. So lately, I’ve taken to trying to hide my cell phone. The problem is, I’m pretty good at remembering where I hide it. So last night I threw my cell phone in the closet without looking. That worked pretty well–I began rummaging through my closet looking for the damn thing to see if I had another 15 minutes to sleep, but after a minute or so, I realized how ridiculous the whole situation was, and got in the shower.

I don’t think I’ll have a fighting chance of getting up on time until someone invents an alarm bed–one that hydraulically ejects you at the the appropriate time. The tragic thing is I suspect I might just keep sleeping on the floor. Maybe I just need to live a world a little more worth waking up to…

(and no, this isn’t related to not getting enough sleep. I have the same problem after 4,6,8, or even 10 hours of sleep.)