From the help page:
7am-12am are what we call earlybird deadlines.
12:01am-6am are what we call nightowl deadlines.
No mention of 6:01am - 6:59am. Which is it?
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According to my experiments, they are invalid values.
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Ooh, sorry we dropped this at the time but it came up again. Namely, @shanaqui was wondering if there’s a technical reason for that 6am-7am gap other than to make the cutoff between earlybird and nightowl deadlines more clear.
The answer is kind of messy.
Here’s what we said in the original blog post about arbitrary deadlines:
You can’t currently have a deadline before noon. We’ll be changing this but for now the interface isn’t good enough to make clear the distinction between, say, a 6am earlybird deadline and a 6am night-owl deadline. I.e. all morning deadlines are of the night-owl variety.
And here’s an excerpt from the original spec:
Night Owls vs Earlybirds
How do we distinguish between someone who wants a 6am end-of-day because they want to be able to pull a beemergency all-nighter and someone who wants a 6am end-of-day because they want to be forced to dispatch their beemergencies before breakfast? They’re both choosing 6am but they mean quite different things. It will be made obvious by picking the deadline via a slider:
[6am ---- 9am ---- 12pm ---- 3pm ---- 6pm ---- 9pm ---- 12am ---- 3am ---- 6am]
If you slide past midnight then a little footnote appears below the slider:
(Night-owl mode! After midnight so technically the next day, which is fine.)
If you slide before noon then the footnote is:
(Earlybird mode! Dispatch your beemergencies before breakfast.)
Webcopy for confirmation of a deadline before midnight (or maybe just an FAQ unless we can make it more concise than this):
WARNING: A deadline before midnight counts as the day boundary, even if it’s in the morning. If you manually add data for a given day then we respect the date you specified (though if it’s an emergency day and the graph has already derailed then it’s too late, the data’s accepted but won’t undo the derailment). If autodata comes in after the deadline then it’s displayed and plotted for the following day.
NB: To simplify the initial implementation we’re not going to allow earlybird deadlines before noon.
Flash forward to the present
(Aside: Note the huge spec no-no there, “or maybe just…”. We’ve gotten better at specs since then. Specs are about making all the decisions, not proposing options! Anyway.)
At some point (UVI#1661) we decided that pre-noon was fine. Then later we accidentally lost some help text webcopy that’s on our list (gissue #58) to put back:
Time of day that this goal will derail if it’s a beemergency. Allowed range is 7am - 6am (NB: Deadlines from 7am to 23:59 are Early Bird deadlines; midnight to 6am are Night Owl deadlines, meaning technically the next day, which is allowed).
I’m not sure how well I’m answering the question here! I’m mildly frustrated with my past self over all that but at least I feel like we’re much better about such things now. Progress!
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I guess I still don’t get why 6:15am can’t exist and be an earlybird deadline.
If the reason is to have a clear demarcation between what counts as nightowl and what has become earlybird, I think it fails because it’s not user-visible unless they happen to choose a deadline in between 6am and 7am… which they can’t have, and which only gives them a vague error message anyway (“There was an error updating your reminder settings for todoistzero”). So… not user visible at all.
Instead, support gets frustrated users who want to have a deadline at a very reasonable and useful time of morning for certain goals like waking up on time, and don’t understand why they can’t. 
So I guess the question is, why an hour’s gap and not a minute? Or five minutes? Something a bit less drastic than taking an entire hour out of the potential times on offer.
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My original thinking was that this is very confusing and the UI needs to be super clear when you’re picking a morning deadline time whether that’s nightowl or earlybird, since those are conceptually and practically utterly different.
Since the UI is not yet clear about that (in fact we have a sad regression from like 2016 that makes it quite opaque about that) I figured we should mitigate the confusion by not allowing pre-noon earlybird deadlines at all until we had the slider thing that would ensure users always knew what they were getting.
Now that we allow earlybird deadlines as early as 7am we probably can’t go back to noon, and it’s clearly confusing and frustrating to not go all the way to 6:01am, and it’s probably not going to be a high enough priority for a while to implement the slider so…
I think one answer is to get that help text back, and while we’re at it maybe go ahead and allow 6:01am+ earlybird deadlines and live with it being black magic that if you pick 6:00am you get nightowl and 6:01am you get earlybird (since it’s arguably even blacker magic in the status quo).
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I am cool with this and think it would be better than the current status.
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Just putting another vote in for making this happen… Trying to implement a morning waterfall, and many of my deadlines would fall in the currently-forbidden 6-7am timeframe. 
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Beeminder is opinionated software and is telling you to sleep in!! 
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