Set an Alarm for 6:45 AM
6:45 is rarely somebody's first choice of number. It is what you land on after a few months of school runs, when you know exactly how long the morning takes and that a quarter to seven is when the adult has to be upright for any of it to work. The field above is pre-filled with 06:45.
Below: the bedtime arithmetic for a 6:45 start, and the thing that actually decides whether a family morning runs on time, which is not the wake-up at all.
Set Alarm
The bottleneck is the bathroom, not the alarm
In a household with one bathroom and three or four people, nobody's morning is limited by when they woke up. It is limited by the line for the bathroom. Which is why 6:45 tends to be an adult's time: fifteen minutes of clear run before the children are awake is enough to be dressed, have the coffee going, and be a functioning person when the first small negotiation of the day arrives.
The practical fix is staggering. Adult at 6:45, first child at 7:00, second at 7:10 — the same total noise, spread out enough that the shower is free when each person reaches it.
Setting a stagger on this page
You do not need three devices for this. Arm 06:45 here, then type 07:00 into the same field and press “Set Alarm” again, and 07:10 after that. All three sit in the list under the field and each fires in turn, with its own tone if you pick a different one before adding it.
Give the later ones a gentler sound than the first. The person who gets up at 6:45 chose to; the person woken at 7:10 did not.
Bedtimes for a 6:45 AM wake-up
| Sleep length | Fall asleep by | Go to bed by |
|---|---|---|
| 9 hours | 9:45 PM | 9:30 PM |
| 7 hours 30 minutes | 11:15 PM | 11:00 PM |
| 6 hours | 12:45 AM | 12:30 AM |
Front-load the evening instead
Every minute of packing, signing, locating and buttering that you move to the night before comes back to you at a five-to-one rate in the morning, because at 7:20 those tasks happen in parallel with four other things and someone crying. Bags by the door, uniforms out, lunches made, permission slips signed. It is the least glamorous advice in existence and it is the only reason 6:45 works.