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Wake-up calls

Getting up when it matters, including when an alarm has stopped working on you.

Phone alarms fail in a specific way: they stop being an event. After enough mornings the dismiss action happens before you are properly awake, and the alarm has become part of the sleep rather than the end of it.

A ringing phone is harder to absorb into a routine, partly because answering one is a social reflex rather than a muscle-memory swipe. That is the whole idea behind a wake-up call, and it is why hotels offered them for a century before anyone had a smartphone.

These articles cover early starts you cannot miss — a flight, an exam, a shift — as well as the harder everyday case of simply not being a morning person. There is also the awkward maths of time zones, clock changes and shift patterns, which is where most wake-up arrangements quietly break.

95 articles