Wake-up call!

So it turns out that precocious talent and universal likeability aren’t the only things I have in common with Rory McIlroy, Andrew Flintoff and the Egyptian wrestling team.

Arriving at the Medinah Country Club in a police car with just minutes to spare before his Ryder Cup tee-off on Sunday, McIlroy demonstrated the truth of an argument I’ve been trying to make to my editor on and off since I emerged bleary-eyed from university last year and took up a job on this paper: namely, that turning up to work a few trifling minutes after the prescribed time once in a while is a sign of welcome nonconformity and healthy rebellion that should be encouraged and praised rather than corrected.

When I do saunter in half-an-hour after the time dictated by the powers that be, my dutiful colleagues sometimes break off from their idle morning chatter to chastise my lateness. They were particularly displeased when a time-zone cock-up on a visit to my girlfriend in Paris resulted in my missing the Eurostar and catching the next available train three hours later. But they also had the cheek to rebuke me for being late last week when I was driving an unfamiliar transit van across town after moving flat and disastrously misjudged the distance from Hackney. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking: “What planet are those box-ticking goody-goodies on?”

They don’t think I’ve made a break from my student cycle yet, which is probably quite a fair diagnosis. I tend to go to bed no earlier than 1am, and usually later, on account of you-only-live-once activities like talking to my flatmate about who we are going to delete as friends on Facebook, listening to the Ryder Cup on the radio or slowly drinking Strongbow (two-litre plastic bottles — you know the deal), watching repeats of The Inbetweeners that we — inexcusably — already know by heart.

Recently, the Standard’s pious clock-watchers (my senior colleagues) have encouraged me to kick the habit and conform to their dreary timetable by getting up a bit earlier. They want me to abandon the healthy rebellion, pragmatic transport utilisation and dyed-in-the-wool habit of casual lateness and join the worker bees at 8.30am in the office, talking about Britain’ s Got Talent, Harry Styles and the latest reason why we should get worked up by intentionally provocative columnists on rival newspapers.

No evidence is too flimsy to be marshalled in defence of their crusade for punctuality. Yesterday they were particularly pleased that a made-up PR survey of 1,000 presumably totally unrepresentative workers “estimated” that lateness costs the economy £9 billion a year. That would be roughly the UK’s foreign aid budget — if it had a grain of truth to it.

But just in case the amateur management consultants on my desk are right, and half-an-hour in the morning is indeed more productive than the extra hour I guiltily stick around for in the evening, I’ve submitted to a bit of testing to see if there is a piece of equipment out there that can overcome my legendarily poor morning performance. Over a week I tried out four gadgets that might succeed where my radio alarm so frequently fails.

Here’s how I got on.

Could a clever clock get Joshi out of bed?

Sleep as Android

An app that tracks your sleep cycle to wake you up when you are slumbering most lightly. It woke me up feeling great at 6.30am but I fell sleep for another hour (not in the cycle sync) and was late to work by 25 minutes. 8/10

£1.69 from the Google play store.

Clocky

If you hit the snooze button twice on this alarm clock on wheels, it jumps off your bedside table and starts scurrying around the room, beeping like a malfunctioning fire alarm. In my tiny bedroom it was thwarted by a wall within seconds and I switched it off for a bit more snoozing. 5/10

£40 from suck.co.uk

Pure Twilight

For some scientific-sounding reason to do with stimulating visual nerves, “dawn simulators” are an increasingly popular way of getting people up in the morning. Nothing worked as well for me as this — the combination of a room bathed in artificial light and the sound of Evan Davis’s sympathetic voice on Radio 4 coaxing a politician into an earlymorning gaffe. Through the door five minutes early. 10/10