Keeping an unoccupied building heated or cooled is always wasteful, unless you're up against some sort of environmental boogeyman like pipe freeze or condensation. The idea that "it costs more to cool it down/reboot/etc." is pure bunk.
- It does not take a half gallon of fuel to start an engine.
- PC's do not surge 5000 amps during the 30 seconds of startup.
- Nor do fluorescent lights, though there's a nugget of truth here: every startup ages the tube slightly (The $2 tube. You can greatly improve this by spending $4 premium on a programmed-start ballast, or just go LED.)
- A/C runs continuously for awhile when you start it back up, but the savings from when it was not running is huge.
- Ditto heat.
There is nothing magical about "1 hour". The house should reach target temperature the moment you walk in the door, and not one minute sooner. If, based on conditions, it will take 40 minutes to do that, then it should start 0:40 before. If it'll take 1:30, start 1:30 before. Smart 'stats like the Nest are good at this; they base it on learned experience and indoor/outdoor ambient temperature differences. "But wait, I don't remember fitting and cabling up an exterior thermostat on my Nest!" No, the Nest got the outside temp by saying "Hey Google, I'm at zip 60061. What's my outdoor temp?" That's why a Nest needs the Internet.
On a thermostat, never overshoot the temperature and come back down. What you're trying to do is kick the furnace into overload to make it get hot faster. Furnaces don't work like that; they only have "on" or "off", 0% or 100% (a few have intermediate settings, but all furnaces understand when the temp is -5 of target, go 100%.
The only thing you could possibly accomplish is, on a heat pump system, get the system to run the primary and emergency heat at the same time, and that is uneconomical. The primary heat will get there in a reasonable time.