It's the best approach when sane-me wakes up first, but usually a totally different personality wakes up first. It can justify almost anything in its effort to stay in bed. Kinda creepy actually, it's what I'd imagine having a multiple personality disorder is like. It's not even a voice, I am not "me" when I wake up :-)
I think part of maturing into an adult is realizing that future-you is not the same as present-you. Understanding that fact can help you solve problems like getting up in the morning; in fact the OP offers such solutions: Schedule an important meeting or event early in the morning that forces you to get up.
One neat app I've discovered lately that helps me with this tremendously is Sleep as Android[1]. It has a "CAPTCHA" mode for alarms, where you have to do some additional task to wake up. It has a few choices for the task, but the most amazing one is QR Code scanning. You "teach" the phone a QR code of your choice, and when the alarm goes off you have to scan the code to turn it off. The use case is printing a QR code on a piece of paper and sticking it in the kitchen/bathroom/whatever room that requires you getting up and walking. A simple, yet (to me) a mind-blowing feature for an alarm.
I use Alarm Clock Extreme for Android, which (among other things) you can set to make you solve math problems before you can shut it off. The complexity of the problems, quantity, etc is configurable.
Much like the GP poster, I'm usually not myself when awakened by an alarm. I can go 30 feet to turn off an alarm and return to bed without ever really being awake. Having to do some multiplication and division wakes up the more rational parts of my brain.
It's what I did before, the problem was that the point of the app is sleep-tracking and waking you up at the optimal time in your sleep cycle. This requires the phone being somewhere on the bed so it can register your movement. The negative side-effect of this is of course being able to turn off the alarm with your eyes more or less closed by blindly grabbing at the phone conveniently placed at arm's reach.
I find that the most banal things on the radio suddenly become endlessly fascinating when the alternative is getting out of bed.
"This advert for conservatories? Oh, I'll just stay in bed until the end of the commercials.. ooh, I've not heard this Rihanna song for a few hours, just one more song.."
I believe just-woke-up me learned a different version of mathematics.
When I set the alarm the night before I can budget my time appropriately. 30 minutes to get where I need to go, 15 minutes for morning chores, 20 minutes for breakfast, etc. I'll add an extra 10 minutes for unpredictability, set my alarm, and go to sleep.
Then when I wake up, I can hit that snooze button because apparently 60 - 9 minutes is plenty of time to get 50 minutes of stuff done. Then I hit it again, because I'm sure I can just do things a little quicker. 60 - 18 is plenty of time to get 50 minutes of stuff done.
Finally I get up and start to wonder how I ever rationalized that I could get 50 minutes of stuff done in 30 minutes.
It reminds me of when I was on prescription pain medications after a surgery.
I realized this about me too, the other day. I'm completely unrealistic about schedule for the first half-an-hour or so after I wake up. So I try to get as much done the evening before so there's less risk of that unrealism trashing my morning.
I tried this too, but then I started getting up while I was still mostly asleep, walking across the room to turn off the alarm, and then going back to bed again. I even tried putting the alarm in a closet, but I'd still get up and turn it off.
What worked for me was (1) going to bed at a reasonable hour and being sure I got 8 full hours of sleep, (2) giving up coffee, and (3) going running every morning (I lived next to golden gate park, totally worth it). I was able to get up early, got tons more done in the morning, and I also got in shape. Best thing I've ever done.
This sometimes happened to me when I was in uni. I'd leave my alarm (my phone usually) on my desk on the other side of the room. Some days I'd wake up and see my phone on the pillow beside me.. when this happened there was always an "OH SHIT WHAT TIME IS IT" panic since it meant that I got up, turned off the alarm and went back to sleep.
I also used my computer as an alarm clock for a little while. I wrote a program that would set the windows volume to whatever value (0 to 100) was passed as a commandline argument and then I set up the task scheduler to run it in the morning. This way, I could play music quietly at night and in the morning the volume got cranked up to 100% to wake me. Worked well until one morning there must have been a power outage and my computer was off...
Solving puzzles to turn off an alarm doesn't work for me either - my still asleep self is quite clever at pulling plugs, taking out batteries or simply just smashing a persistent alarm.
Luckily, unless I'm really tired (eg go to bed at 6am, get up at 8am), I normally wake up before I need to get up. Actually getting up is a lot harder than waking up tough.
Clearly getting out of bed isn't all the work in waking up, but it's a good start. If done in addition to the other things you mention, it's helpful. Getting up just seems to get your juices flowing better, at least based on anecdotal evidence.
I've read about people scheduling their laptops/phones to read them messages foreseeing any excuse and trying to argue against it.
"You think another 30 minutes will be fine, but remember how you always regret that afterwards? Remember how you spend the rest of each day wishing you'd got up 30 minutes earlier? Do you want to be that pathetic, regretful person again today?"
Of course, Sleep Self would probably reply "Hell yes, bed is awesome!"
It's the best approach when sane-me wakes up first, but usually a totally different personality wakes up first. It can justify almost anything in its effort to stay in bed. Kinda creepy actually, it's what I'd imagine having a multiple personality disorder is like. It's not even a voice, I am not "me" when I wake up :-)