That's exactly what I do. Every night, I carefully set the settings on my iPhone so that I won't be disturbed by email notifications or other stuff. Every morning, I carefully set the settings on my iPhone so that I'll know when I get emails or texts or other messages. If I forget to do this, I miss a lot of stuff, but I really have no choice but to rely on myself.

Does it really make sense that it takes so much effort? These are otherwise such effortless machines; it just seems weird that I can't make this part of using them easier.

If you mute your iPhone, alarms will still make noise. I mute my phone when I go to sleep and un-mute it when I wake up.

I think it's exactly this pain that iOS 6's Do Not Disturb mode is meant to alleviate.

I hadn't heard about that until this thread - nice! I am looking forward to that. Seems like a great thing.

That's exactly what I did as I mentioned in the post

My note wasn't for you.

You solved your "problem" in a Google search, but used this article as a trojan horse to soap box about two unrelated tangents. My note was for everyone here who was wondering how to fix it, but weren't willing to look in the second lines of the sixth paragraph.