Just like the majority of working folks, I use an alarm to wake up every morning Monday through Friday. And just like a huge chunk of those folks, I use the iPhone clock alarm to get my attention and summon me out of bed. There is one aspect of this daily routine that is unnecessarily annoying.

Let’s say I have two alarms. The second one scheduled as a back-up in case the first one doesn’t wake me up. Or in case I wake up and (in an act of self-sabotage) I instinctively turn off the first alarm and go back to bed.

Similar to many people out there, my body has trained itself to wake up 5 or 10 minutes right before my initial alarm goes up. Basically, it’s gotten used to the routine so it just wakes up itself -instead of being prompted. So at this point, I’m awake and ready to get ready for work. But, I have two active alarms that haven’t been triggered yet. If I do nothing to the alarms and go and take a shower, the phone will start to make it’s LOUD alarm sounds while I’m gone. This could be a distraction and an annoyance to anyone nearby who is (lucky for them!) still sleeping. So why don’t I just turn OFF the alarms? Well, because if I turn them off, then I have to turn them on again every day to be prepared for the next day. This completely defeats the purpose of having a recurring alarm notification.

I propose a new feature. We can call it a one-time-snooze, or a one-time-OFF, or maybe we can come up with the name later. But how it would work would be: for a given alarm notification, the user can request that the application forgo the immediate upcoming alarm reminder. That way, I can go off and get ready, the phone will not sound an alarm for the morning, but it will be ready to do so the next morning!