Who holds the off switch? Shefrin and Thaler's planner and doer, applied to an alarm

An alarm is a message from one version of you to another. The version who set it, at 10:40 the night before, wants an early start and means it. The version who reads it, with the room still dark, owns the only button that matters. That arrangement is almost exactly the one economists Robert Strotz and, later, Hersh Shefrin and Richard Thaler built a model around, and it explains a feature of snooze buttons that willpower talk misses: the person who asks and the person who answers are never in the room at the same time.

This article uses that model to do one practical thing. It proposes a three-question test for any wake-up setup, scores seven common ones, and says where the test breaks. The scoring is my own judgment, not data, and the model it leans on is a metaphor with a good track record rather than a measurement of anything in the head.

What did Strotz notice in 1955?

Strotz’s paper, “Myopia and Inconsistency in Dynamic Utility Maximization” (Review of Economic Studies, 1955-56), starts from a problem that looks small: a plan that is best for you today may no longer be best for you when tomorrow arrives, even if nothing about the world has changed. Today’s you ranks “wake at 6:30” above “sleep until 7:15”. Tomorrow’s you, at 6:30, ranks them the other way round. Strotz called this dynamic inconsistency and offered two ways out. One is precommitment, which means arranging things now so that tomorrow’s choice is closed off. The other is consistent planning, which means choosing only plans that your future self will actually carry out. Odysseus tied to the mast is the textbook picture of the first.

The alarm clock, on its own, is neither. A snoozable alarm does not close off the future choice and it does not anticipate it. It is a request. I will defend one claim here: a standard alarm is not a commitment device, however much it is described as one, because the future self can reverse it with one tap at no cost.

What did Shefrin and Thaler add in 1981?

They gave the problem a cast. In “An Economic Theory of Self-Control” (Journal of Political Economy, 89(2), 392-406; NBER working paper 208), the abstract describes treating a person as an organization with two parts: a far-sighted planner and a myopic doer. The planner is the principal and the doer is the agent. The authors recast Strotz’s model to include the control features he had left out. The planner cannot simply overrule the doer. It can only change the doer’s situation: restrict what the doer is allowed to choose, change what the doer will be paid or fined for choosing, or build rules the doer is reluctant to break.

That list is the useful part. It turns “have more discipline” into a question with an answer: what is the planner able to change before the doer wakes up?

What happens to the model at 6:30 a.m.?

Here the metaphor strains. A myopic doer implies someone who weighs nine more minutes in bed against a late start and picks the nine minutes. A person emerging from deep sleep may not be weighing anything. Researchers call the groggy interval sleep inertia, and thinking in it can be markedly impaired, though how long it lasts varies a lot between people and nights. If the doer is not choosing so much as failing to boot, then models about weak preferences do not fit well, and models about impaired decisions fit better.

The test below survives that objection, and I think that is a point in its favor. Whether the 6:30 self is short-sighted or simply impaired, the practical advice is the same: do not leave an important rule to be enforced by that self.

What are the three questions?

Take any wake-up setup and ask:

1. Who can undo it at 6:30? If the answer is “me”, the doer holds the off switch.
2. What does the undo cost them? Measure it in effort and in consequences, not in how annoying the alarm is.
3. Does the penalty reach someone who cannot be talked out of it? A fine you pay to yourself does not.

My claim, which is a hypothesis and not a finding, is that the best setups are ones where the cheapest way to undo the device is to do the thing the device exists to produce. Call it undo-equals-compliance. A device that passes that test cannot be defeated without getting up.

How do seven common setups score?

Nobody has measured these setups against each other.

Setup	Who can undo it at 6:30	Cost of the undo	Verdict
Phone alarm with snooze	You	One tap	Fails
Alarm across the room	You	A walk, followed by a return to bed	Weak
Puzzle or math alarm	You	A minute of effort	Weak to fair
Self-fine, paid to your own account	You	Nothing	Fails
Phone in a time-locked box	You, by breaking the box	Real inconvenience	Fair
A friend holds a forfeit you pay on a miss	The friend	Persuading the friend	Passes if the friend is attentive
An app that sends a randomly chosen camera-roll photo to friends on a miss	You, by getting up and recording	The goal itself	Passes if the friends look

The present-bias side of self-fines is the subject of a constructed Q&A with a behavioral economist; the question here is narrower, namely who holds the waiver. Two things stand out. Every setup that fails or scores weakly leaves the undo with you at 6:30. And the middle rows, the ones that raise effort, run into a fact the model predicts: a doer who wants nine more minutes will pay a minute of effort for them. Making the exit harder helps only until the doer’s price for the exit is met.

Does any evidence back the idea that others should set the rule?

One famous study is off the table. Ariely and Wertenbroch’s 2002 deadline experiment in Psychological Science was retracted in September 2026 after a failed replication and data concerns raised by Data Colada, so I do not rely on it. The claim that the person who sets the rule should not be the person who can waive it rests on the model, and on the ordinary experience of fines nobody collects, not on that experiment.

That leaves the argument without a clean experiment behind it. A proper test would need people randomly assigned to self-held and other-held penalties, with wake times measured, and I know of none.

What does the arithmetic look like?

A purely illustrative case, with invented numbers. Suppose the doer would pay $2 for nine more minutes in bed. A $1 penalty paid to yourself leaves the snooze a bargain. A $5 forfeit that goes to a friend, who may or may not forgive it, changes the doer’s sum, but only if two things hold: the friend is attentive, and the forfeit cannot be waived by the doer after the fact. If the doer can tell the friend “I overslept, skip it”, the effective penalty falls back toward zero. In the model’s terms, what matters is not the size of the penalty but who holds the authority to waive it.

Is the planner any good at the job?

Not as good as it feels at 10:40 p.m. With the lamp on, the phone charging and a glass of water on the nightstand, the planner is calm, rested enough and certain about tomorrow. George Loewenstein’s 1996 paper “Out of Control: Visceral Influences on Behavior” (Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 65(3), 272-292) argues that people in a cool state underestimate how much hunger, craving or exhaustion will pull on them later. The 10:40 planner is a cool-state forecaster predicting the behavior of a warm, heavy, half-conscious doer.

The practical consequence is to build in margin. If you think a $5 forfeit is enough, the model suggests it should be bigger, or, better, it should be unwaivable by you. Planners tend to write rules that would work on themselves, not rules that would work on the doer.

What should a planner do on a Tuesday night?

Three moves follow from the test, and none needs a gadget.

First, move the waiver out of your hands. Name one person who decides whether a miss counts, and tell them in advance that you will try to talk them out of it. The arrangement used by commitment contract sites such as stickK, which assigns a referee to confirm your report, is built on the same idea; a comparison of stickK, Beeminder and social accountability covers where it holds up.

Second, make the cheapest undo the goal. If the only way to make a penalty disappear is to be upright and on camera, the penalty has no escape hatch except the one you want.

Third, assume the 6:30 version of you is stronger than the 10:40 version thinks. Add margin, and write the rule down at night, because the bedside is no place to negotiate.

Where does DontSnooze fit?

On the table’s last row, with conditions. If you miss, DontSnooze sends a randomly chosen camera-roll photo to your group, and the way to avoid that is to get up and record proof, so undoing the penalty and doing the goal are the same act. It depends on friends who look; a muted group chat turns it into an alarm with a delay. Posting your own proof needs DontSnooze Pro, priced in the pricing breakdown, and the app is iOS-only.

Anyone who would rather not pay can borrow the logic for free. Ask one friend to be the only person who can waive a penalty, and tell them in advance that you will try to talk them out of it.

What would count as evidence against this framework?

If people who snooze mostly do so because of sleep debt or poor sleep timing, then no commitment device is addressing the real problem, and the test describes a tool for a minority case. The alarm is also not the only moment where the doer wins; the way a snooze becomes the unchosen option on a phone is part of it, and the model has nothing to say about that.

I have also not run any of this. The table is reasoning from first principles. A proper test would assign setups at random, measure real wake times, and check whether undo-equals-compliance predicts anything the usual advice does not. Until someone does that, the framework is a way to ask better questions about your own mornings: who sets the rule, who can waive it, and what happens when they do.