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How people woke up before alarm clocks
- Frieren 7mo ago> "In many pre-industrial societies, daily life followed the rhythm of sunrise and sunset, which naturally shaped circadian rhythms." Having an office job that allows for flexible hours, I start my working day at different times during the year. Setting the alarm to the latest hour that I can start to work it never wakes me up, but it is there just in case. Overall, I feel that I am less stressed, sleep better and have more energy that if I force myself a schedule to wake up. What I have is a schedule to go to sleep, the rest I leave to nature. > Mary Smith, a much-loved knocker upper in East London Great picture.
- tayo42 7mo agoOne of the benefits of remote work is not waking up with an alarm clock. It's been so long I forgot how much that sucked. And the snooze button.
- EricBetts 7mo agoI think we might need another term for working both remote and with a flexible schedule. I'm working remote, have been at a few jobs, but while my location isn't an office, my schedule is fixed, the same as if I were going in.
- al_borland 7mo agoDo you not have to be online at a certain time when remote? I’ve been remote for 6 years now, and did it on and off for a while before that. I’m still woken up by an alarm clock, because I can’t get myself to go to bed at a reasonable time, but have to be online for meetings and stuff and 9am… I think many would prefer 8am, but that’s just a symptom of a broken meeting culture.
- asdff 7mo agoFor me I just wake up at about the same time every day, and that is ahead of anything on the schedule. It isn't like you might end up sleeping another couple hours. I physically can't sleep past 8 hours or so.
- tayo42 7mo ago9 or 10am means going to sleep by 1 or 2am, idk wasn't an issue for me to be up, even at my worst phase of stay up smoke weed and watch TV lol
- verma_yatharth 7mo agoAlarm clocks with needles have a huge error in minutes. I also suffered when I was a teenager.
- pinkmuffinere 7mo ago> Setting the alarm to the latest hour that I can start to work it never wakes me up Funny enough, I have the same strategy but the exact opposite experience -- it _almost always_ wakes me up, even when it's set for 11 am. I don't disagree with you though, I just think it's funny how different human experience is. And there are benefits too, it's easy for me to stay up late, and a lot of my best work comes naturally at 1 am. But basically nothing good happens before noon.
- FreePalestine1 7mo agoI'm pretty much the same. Nothing done before noon. I show up to the office on time just for the sake of it, I then get my work done at night. My manager is okay with it but it is not sustainable, I feel like it takes unnecessary time out of my day. But it is genuinely hard.
- pinkmuffinere 7mo agoCan you negotiate with your manager about start time? I know it will depend on the exact team, but n my old team I would walk into the office at like 10:30 every day, and then stay in the office till about 7-8 every evening. I wasn't secretive about it, but nobody was upset, it was obvious that I was staying later to get work done.
- al_borland 7mo agoI think the important part was that they also had a schedule for sleep. That’s the real key to a natural wake up. I’ve struggled with the decision to go to sleep my whole life. If left to my own devices I’d effectively have a 28-30 hour day and my sleep/wake times would continuously shift.
- seemaze 7mo agoI've had the great privilege of working remote for quite a while. Unless I have an early flight to catch, I don't set an alarm. I tend to wake up within 60 min. of sunrise regardless of the season and fall asleep somewhere around T-8 hrs. I can't tell you how much I'd dread having to be violently aroused from my slumber on an ongoing basis.
- duttish 7mo agoFlex work time is awesome. Other than flights I haven't set an alarm since before covid. 1.5 years of basically no irl social life and going to bed at 22 every day has really hammered home my rhythm. I still wake up around 06-07 every day.
- nyxtom 7mo agoSingle greatest thing I did to fix my circadian rhythm was get a sunset/sunrise lighting alarm. I have some hue lights and a "Hatch" alarm clock that both do sunrise lighting and some light morning noise that gradually increases lighting early in the morning. Even when its dark outside, my body has accustomed to it so much that I didn't even notice day light savings at all. Best investment for myself and my daughter I've ever done.
- polyterative 7mo agoI love my smart rolling shutters to do the same, literally night and day difference :P
- Scrapemist 7mo agoI do the same in the evening. Gradually fading the light low till they turn off one by one, over the course of an hour and a half. It has the reverse effect and makes me sleepy.
- mixmastamyk 7mo agoDoes that clock require an app or internet telemetry?
- dbancajas 7mo agoany brands or models you can recommend?
- Apreche 7mo agoRoosters
- Zambyte 7mo agoHow did roosters.wake up before alarm clocks?
- kirubakaran 7mo agoIt's roosters all the way dawn
- expedition32 7mo agoPeople went to bed when the sun went down because candles cost money. The light bulb changed everything.
- richev 7mo agoLighting was the killer app for electricity.
- somenameforme 7mo agoOutdoor lighting in particular, at first at least. A fun historical anecdote on this one most don't know is the saying that somebody "can’t hold a candle to [x]". It's a reference to the old profession of link-boys who were mostly poor kids who'd carry a torch at night for people to see their way about, in exchange for a penny or two.
- xeromal 7mo agoI find that when I go camping, I get sleepy early around 9pm and I wake at 6 feeling more refreshed than I do at home. Fresh air and birds chirping. It's honestly a dream
- ghewgill 7mo agoElectricity costs money too? I don't know how the cost of power compared to the cost of a candle in the beginning of the 20th century though.
- al_borland 7mo agoI’m going to get an electricity bill each month no matter what. I won’t notice a few bulbs being on for a couple extra hours each day. I would notice having to go out and buy candles all the time, or needing to make them. A candle can be consumed over the course of a day or maybe even a few hours. A light bulb can last months or years. If light bulbs burned out as fast as candles burn, I would be a fanatic about keeping the lights off and only use them when absolutely necessary.
- LoganDark 7mo agoWhen I started ADHD medication, I started to be able to wake up on time without an alarm. All I need is a nearby source of the current time and somehow I can just wake up when I plan to. I do still use alarms sometimes when I don't expect I'll be able to check the time and continue to fully waking up, but mostly I haven't needed them nearly as much as I used to.
- asah 7mo agoum, candle with a nail stuck in the side ? https://www.google.com/search?q=candle+alarm+clock https://www.google.com/search?q=candle+alarm+clock
- duskwuff 7mo agoYou mean the "candles that drop metal pins every hour" mentioned in the subtitle?
- tkgally 7mo ago“Most Indians [= indigenous Americans] did not know how old they were. They measured time in days, moons, and winters, but they had no weeks, hours, or minutes. On the eve of an important event, when they were afraid they might oversleep in the morning—for example, when a war party discovered an enemy camp and wanted to make sure to wake up and attack it at first light—Indians would drink a lot of water before going to bed.” — Ian Frazier, Great Plains (1989), p. 48.
- devsda 7mo ago> but they had no weeks, hours, or minutes. I don't think this is true. We (Asian) Indians make a big deal out of beginning and doing important tasks at auspicious times. That wouldn't be possible without some means of measuring time of day even if its not perfect. Edit: updated for clarity and leaving original comment as is.
- triceratops 7mo agoIndigenous Americans. Not East Indians.
- tkgally 7mo agoThanks for clarifying that. Considering HN's worldwide readership, I should have anticipated that misunderstanding when I posted the quotation. I have now added "[= indigenous Americans]" above.
- qup 7mo agoI would have thought the war parties of the great plains would give it away.
- devsda 7mo agoMy bad. I too should have considered that the term "Indians" is ambiguous and should have looked up the reference book. Thought the title "Great Plains" was referring to plains including the Indo-Gangetic plain. Is "East Indians" the commonly used name in the US for the people of India ? I've come across "Asian Indians".
- randypellegrini 7mo ago[dead]
- taeric 7mo agoI haven't used an alarm clock in my adult life. I don't remember using them when I was younger, but think that is just not remembering. I'm not convinced everyone can just wake up, but I am increasingly convinced it is more possible than most people care to admit.
- andrekandre 7mo agome neither; i must be an outlier but if i need to wake up at 5 i'll just wake of at 5 (or so) naturally even if groggy and under-slept... i must have some kind of internal alarm clock...
- taeric 7mo agoAbsolutely the same. And it isn't like I have a good internal timer, as I am not good at judging how long I have been somewhere.
- h4kunamata 7mo agoI have my phone set as backup and because I am guilty of the +5 minutes I always wake up between 5-30 minutes before it goes off, if I have something important the next day tho, I don't sleep at all because my brain won't let me :)
- elzbardico 7mo agoSomewhat related I find it very funny how some people who identify as conservatives absolutely abhor dailight saving times as something which is "unnatural". Well, there's nothing more natural than waking up earlier and resting later in the summer, while doing the contrary in the winter. Dailight Savings looks to me like at least an attempt of humans to try to follow the natural rythm of sunrise and sunset as "God intended us to do". Why are you against DST? Are you some sort of communist bureaucrat that want to impose us this government clock instead of respecting God's nature laws?
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- threethirtytwo 7mo agoThis story is strangely parallel to the software developer. Just as the knocker uppers stared at their own end... so do we. I wonder if they were in denial as well?
- SomewhatLikely 7mo agohttp://astronaut.io/ http://astronaut.io/
- verma_yatharth 7mo agoI think it happened because our subconscious mind has its own clock running and it remembers hours and hours of our time From years.
- dzonga 7mo agounless you a stressful day - with enough hydration - and decent sleep - you can command yourself to wake up without an alarm. anyone who has gone through boarding school, military etc knows this to be true.
- keiferski 7mo agoWhen researching my ancestry, I came across someone with the last name Budzik, which literally means alarm clock in contemporary Polish. Historically it was tied to the verb budzić, to wake up, so I imagine either my great-great-great grandfather worked as a waker-upper…or he snored a lot.
- PufPufPuf 7mo agoI also have that surname in my ancestry! Here's a Czech source claiming that the name might more likely be related to a shortened first name, or an old word for a stuffed stomach, used to describe a fat person: https://dvojka.rozhlas.cz/budik-8215419 https://dvojka.rozhlas.cz/budik-8215419
- aaron695 7mo ago[dead]