tl;dr: this addresses a fundamentally different problem, which would exist even if you went to sleep early The problem with the alarm clock is that people trad

tl;dr: this addresses a fundamentally different problem, which would exist even if you went to sleep early The problem with the alarm clock is that people traditionally put the clock on a night stand or somewhere easily accessible from the bed. At that point, if you can hit snooze from the bed, you most likely will doze off. Most of the time, even if you went to sleep early, there will be some internal resistance to actually leaving the bed (it's warm :) If you put the alarm far away, then you are forced to get up, and by that point you've already fought most of the resistance to actually getting up. Problem there is that the visual clock is too far away from the bed. The real problem that this solves is decoupling the physical clock presence from the alarm silence mechanism, forcing you to physically leave the bed. Even if you get up early, you still have to overcome the desire to leave the bed.