For more than the last 12 months, I've got into a habit of rarely getting more than 6 hours sleep a night, except on the occasional weekend.
I've done this to try to maximise the amount of waking hours available to me to as get things done as I want, but when I look at the last year, I just don't see the results of this approach at all, and I only end up being frustrated with how little I'm getting done compared to what I want to do.
I'm gonna try a couple of weeks of being adamant about sleeping 8 hrs a night, even if this means cutting social engagements short, to see if I end up being more productive during the time I have awake.
I might write about the differences in my days if I notice any.
Update - This lasted about 6 days before I went back to my usual 4 - 6 hours of sleep on average each night.
3 Comments
If you really want to get serious about this as an experiment you should track how much sleep you get, how much exercise, how long you work and how you feel each day as well as how productive you are. Then do a regression and see which factors contribute the most to your dependent measures.
I’d probably throw in caffeine and alcohol consumption, social interaction and entertainment as independent measures as well.
And if we are going to get this carried away you might as mash in weather data like temperature, sunshine, and barometric pressure.
… and while we’re at it, why not publish it all to Daytum too, like this fella
Nice to hear from you again Steve!
Well… I’m tracking exercise through Runkeeper here, and I’ve cut out alcohol since coming back to London, which leaves a few less factors to track.
So far, I’ve been going out a couple times a week, but managed to keep to the 8 hr rule.
So far, I’m not noticing a huge difference – I don’t feel much more productive, and to be honest, I miss the extra waking hours more than I miss the sleep, if there’s no real difference at the end of the next week, I’ll think about seeing how I get by for couple of weeks on 7 hrs again after the month.
Thanks for that Daytum link!