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1-2-3: The Hidden Cost of Hitting Snooze (And What to Do Instead)
sent by Joaquín Kosegarten | July 07, 2026
Your alarm goes off.
You smack the snooze button, curl back into the warmth, and buy yourself nine more glorious minutes.
Harmless, right?
Not quite.
What feels like a tiny act of self-care is actually sabotaging your entire morning, and costing you more time than it gives you.
1 Idea
Get up the first time your alarm rings. No snoozing.
2 Ways it saves you time
1. When you hit snooze and drift back to sleep, your brain restarts a new sleep cycle it will never get to finish. You wake up in the middle of deeper sleep, triggering a state called sleep inertia: grogginess that can last up to 90 minutes. That’s 90 minutes of slow thinking, poor decisions, and wasted effort at the start of your day. Skipping the snooze does not give you less rest. It gives you a sharper brain, 90 minutes earlier.
2. Most people think snoozing makes the morning gentler. It actually makes it harder. Every time you drift off and wake again, your nervous system gets a jolt of stress hormones to pull you out. Over weeks, that pattern trains your body to start every day in fight-or-flight mode, which drains energy you need later. Ditching snooze does not just save you time in the morning. It protects the energy you use for the rest of the day.
3 Steps to Get It Done:
1.Tonight, move your alarm across the room. If you have to stand up to turn it off, you have already won half the battle.
2. Set one alarm, not three. Multiple alarms teach your brain to ignore the first one. One alarm, one action.
3. The moment the alarm rings, do one small physical action: sit up, stretch, drink a glass of water by the bed. Movement cancels the pull of the pillow.
Conclusion
Snooze is not rest. It’s a tax on your morning, paid in grogginess.
The minute you stop negotiating with your alarm, your whole day starts earlier and sharper. Try it tomorrow and watch how different 9am feels.
This is exactly what the Energy step in Get It Done is built around: small morning decisions that protect your fuel for everything that follows.
“But those extra minutes feel soooo good!”
They feel good for about 45 seconds. Then they cost you an hour of foggy thinking and a stressed nervous system. The version of you that wakes up on the first alarm is not suffering. That version is the one who gets back 90 minutes of sharp, clear time, every single morning. That’s a trade worth making.
As promised — 1 minute that can save you hours
Yours in Getting It Done,
Joaquin Kosegarten
Author of Get It Done
Creator of the 1-2-3 Get It Done Newsletter
P.S. Fun Fact: The snooze button was not originally designed with your wellbeing in mind. When General Electric-Telechron introduced the first mainstream snooze alarm in 1956, the nine-minute interval was chosen for a surprisingly mechanical reason: the gears in the clock could not reliably produce a perfect ten-minute delay, so engineers settled on nine as the closest feasible option. Nearly 70 years later, we are still hitting a button designed around a 1950s gear limitation, not human sleep science.
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The Hidden Cost of Hitting Snooze (And What to Do Instead)
About the Newsletter
1-2-3 Get It Done is a weekly 1-minute read trusted by busy professionals who want to achieve more in less time without burning out.
Each issue gives you 1 idea, 2 ways it saves you time, and 3 steps to put it into action immediately.