Productivity
Sleep — an attempt to reduce it
Saturday the 11 of November, 2006
Sleep. If only we could do without!
Sleep is not my friend. As a budding young entrepreneur I have a desire to go about life with less sleep and more waking moments in life. I always feel like those moments in bed are moments that could be used for a more noble purpose. I had such a strong desire to sleep less that I set out to do something about it.
As any good Industrial Technologist knows—for something to be controllable it must be measurable. So I wrote down the time I went to sleep and time I woke up every morning for a year. Measuring it gave me a good benchmark to improve upon.
To summarize — I slept an average of 7.40 hours each day and was awake for 16.6 hours of each day. This is a total of 112 days asleep and 253 days awake. Or, to put it another way, I slept away 31% of the year, and was awake for 69% of the year.
After the above graphed year I tried a few experiments with my day to see if I could reduce the time I spent sleeping. For example, I once tried strictly limiting my sleep to 5 hours each night … it lasted about 2 weeks and I gave myself a fever. Then I tried pulling an all–nighter once a week for as many weeks as I could manage. That did not last long either. Most notably because the 2nd day after the all–nighter was always so unproductive that the extra time I was awake did not produce a net increase in my productivity.
I guess I should feel privileged though. I slept 7.40 hours per day on average. That is 1.20 hours less than the average person my age in 1910.
Sleep is not my friend. As a budding young entrepreneur I have a desire to go about life with less sleep and more waking moments in life. I always feel like those moments in bed are moments that could be used for a more noble purpose. I had such a strong desire to sleep less that I set out to do something about it.
As any good Industrial Technologist knows—for something to be controllable it must be measurable. So I wrote down the time I went to sleep and time I woke up every morning for a year. Measuring it gave me a good benchmark to improve upon.
Graph of sleep time for one year
To summarize — I slept an average of 7.40 hours each day and was awake for 16.6 hours of each day. This is a total of 112 days asleep and 253 days awake. Or, to put it another way, I slept away 31% of the year, and was awake for 69% of the year.
After the above graphed year I tried a few experiments with my day to see if I could reduce the time I spent sleeping. For example, I once tried strictly limiting my sleep to 5 hours each night … it lasted about 2 weeks and I gave myself a fever. Then I tried pulling an all–nighter once a week for as many weeks as I could manage. That did not last long either. Most notably because the 2nd day after the all–nighter was always so unproductive that the extra time I was awake did not produce a net increase in my productivity.
I guess I should feel privileged though. I slept 7.40 hours per day on average. That is 1.20 hours less than the average person my age in 1910.
So to make a long story short — I have yet to find a good way to sleep less on a consistent basis. Any ideas?Today, average young adults report sleeping about seven to seven and one-half hours each night. Compare this to sleep patterns in 1910, before the electric lightbulb, the average person slept nine hours each night. This means that today's population sleeps one to two hours less than people did early in the century (Webb and Agnew, 1975). — Stanley Coren, Ph.D. Psychiatric Times. 1998
Life without T.V.
Saturday the 28 of October, 2006
I do not own a T.V.—never have. In all my time in
front of a T.V. I have never felt like a better
person, and occasionally I have felt worse. I
think it boils down to the lack of quality
content & large percentage of bad advertising
that give me such an aversion to it. What T.V.
attempts to provide us—news, entertainment, and
education—can all be had elsewhere.
News
Owning my own business naturally taxes my time and spending an hour watching news on T.V. to get 10 minutes of filtered data is ludicrous. So for the past few years I have been slowly building a workflow of alternative sources & tools for news. Here is what I use on a daily basis:
NewsFire allows me to receive news from all my favorite sites that support RSS—articles are delivered to me just like email. Any articles of interest are bookmarked to my del.icio.us account via Cocoalicious, which has integrated support in NewsFire. Lastly I use Safari to view the full news articles because it has full integration with Apple's Mail—I can email the entire contents of the web page if I want to share it with anyone.
Entertainment
Thanks to the world of legally downloadable movies, T.V. shows, and music there is no need to tune into the networks—just buy it off the iTunes store, or search for it on YouTube.com.
Education
This is the most fascinating (and scary) change that the internet has brought to life. I am old enough to remember a childhood without a computer, and schooling without the internet—I used to have to go to the library to look up information! But as a college freshman I got a Bondi-blue iMac and my life changed forever. My regularly used sources when searching are:
But even more valuable than the ease of searching is the ease of networking—the internet has enabled rapid communications so I can ask a specific question on some appropriate message board and get an answer from half way across the globe in a matter of seconds. These chance encounters can lead to great opportunities for information-sharing.
News
Owning my own business naturally taxes my time and spending an hour watching news on T.V. to get 10 minutes of filtered data is ludicrous. So for the past few years I have been slowly building a workflow of alternative sources & tools for news. Here is what I use on a daily basis:
- NewsFire—the ultimate RSS experience for the Mac.
- del.icio.us—online bookmarking
- Cocoalicious—a Mac App to access del.icio.us
- Safari—web browsing with email integration
NewsFire allows me to receive news from all my favorite sites that support RSS—articles are delivered to me just like email. Any articles of interest are bookmarked to my del.icio.us account via Cocoalicious, which has integrated support in NewsFire. Lastly I use Safari to view the full news articles because it has full integration with Apple's Mail—I can email the entire contents of the web page if I want to share it with anyone.
Entertainment
Thanks to the world of legally downloadable movies, T.V. shows, and music there is no need to tune into the networks—just buy it off the iTunes store, or search for it on YouTube.com.
Education
This is the most fascinating (and scary) change that the internet has brought to life. I am old enough to remember a childhood without a computer, and schooling without the internet—I used to have to go to the library to look up information! But as a college freshman I got a Bondi-blue iMac and my life changed forever. My regularly used sources when searching are:
- Google—a blanket search tool
- AskJeeves—an alternative view of what's on the web
- Wikipedia—taken with a grain of salt and some good cross-referencing
- News archives (NewsFire & del.icio.us)—interesting things I have saved
But even more valuable than the ease of searching is the ease of networking—the internet has enabled rapid communications so I can ask a specific question on some appropriate message board and get an answer from half way across the globe in a matter of seconds. These chance encounters can lead to great opportunities for information-sharing.