For my analog experience, I decided to do a one-week experiment: a friend would function as my personal alarm clock. I chose one of my staff members and friend, Jennifer, to wake me up every day at 8:30am by knocking on my door. Jenn was the perfect candidate because she had 9:30 classes every day and would wake up at 8:15 to get ready and grab breakfast before class. I figured she would not mind manually waking me up since we live in the same residence hall. At first, I thought the experiment would go smoothly because as someone who suffers from chronic insomnia I assumed that I would have no trouble waking up at all.

With this experience, I wanted to continue my tradition of writing about alarm clocks and see where it would take me, and how it would change my perception of time. The first 2-3 days of the experiment was almost comical. On the first day, when Jenn knocked on my door I woke up and looked at the time on my phone and immediately decided to fall back asleep because I assumed it was a resident knocking on my door. I am a resident assistant in my hall so I always have residents knocking on my door. Some days I ignore them because I either get lazy or too tired. You can imagine my surprise when after an hour of sleep, I woke up in complete horror because I had completely failed my experiment on the first day. Not only was I disappointed but I was also shocked. I had realized that my self-reliance and self-confidence about being a morning person was completely based on the fact that my phone was my savior. Even though I still have the alarm clock my father gave me years ago, using my phone as an alarm clock had become instinctual because hitting the snooze button did not require me to leave my bed. Essentially, my phone had turned me into a completely lazy and dependent person.

The following days were much better, and to my surprise quite fun. Once Jenn knocked on my door, I would wake up and open the door to let her know that I was awake. Because I was forced to leave my bed to answer the door, I lost interest in using my phone and instead got my day started right away. In those days, I had an epiphany of sorts. I had come to realize that because I did not spend a lot of time on my phone right after waking up, my days started much earlier and felt more productive. I felt a boost in confidence because I would get work done and still have enough time to grab breakfast and go to class feeling prepared. What was meant to be an experiment had now turned into a life changing experience. While I have always known that our perception of time is partly psychological, I never really understood or appreciated this fact until after I finished this experiment. The saying “time flies” became a myth during this experiment because time did not seem to fly, time felt stable and under my control. This was a completely new experience because after three years of being in college, time always seemed to be against me. Assignments and deadlines would always seem to creep up on me and everything felt out of my control. This assignment made me realize that time is what we make of it and how we decide to use it has the ability to change how we go about our days and ultimately make us reassess our priorities.