Nap Timer
Pick a nap, lie down. A gentle alarm wakes you — it starts quiet and grows louder.
Free from Ticka — the reminder app that rings like an alarm, even on silent. Napping with your phone nearby? Ticka wakes you even when it’s on silent. App Store → Google Play → App Store → Google Play →
Give it two or three minutes and some daylight before anything important — the fog after a nap lifts on its own. Next time you can nap with the phone face down: Ticka’s alarm rings even on silent, and your usual nap is one tap away.
Napping with your phone nearby? Ticka wakes you even when it’s on silent. App Store → Google Play →
10, 20, 26 or 90 minutes: picking a nap length
The length matters because of what sleep does after about half an hour. Early on you are in light sleep, and waking from it is easy. Stay down longer and you slide into deep, slow-wave sleep — wake up in the middle of that and you get sleep inertia, the heavy, stupid feeling that can last longer than the nap was worth.
Short naps avoid it. In a 2006 study at Flinders University, Amber Brooks and Leon Lack compared naps of 5, 10, 20 and 30 minutes: the ten-minute nap gave the best mix of quick recovery and almost no grogginess, while the thirty-minute one paid for its benefits with a slow start. Twenty minutes is the common compromise. The “NASA nap” comes from a 1995 study of long-haul pilots, who slept about 26 minutes on average during a planned rest and were measurably more alert afterwards.
Ninety minutes works the other way round: it is roughly one full sleep cycle, so you go through deep sleep and come back up to light sleep before the alarm. It is the nap for after a short night — not for a ten-minute gap before a meeting.
The setting most nap timers leave out is the time it takes to fall asleep. If you need seven minutes to drift off, a twenty-minute timer gives you thirteen minutes of sleep. Add that buffer above, and the nap you chose is the nap you get.
To wake at a clock time rather than after a length of sleep — 6:45 tomorrow, say — use the online alarm clock.