SharePoint Nick

writings about SharePoint and running a software business
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Sleep experiment finished

Well I got to Thursday morning at 4am and decided to end the sleep experiment of 30 minutes sleep every 4 hours. I would have thought I would have quit due to being tired, but by the third day I was coping very well and was probably at 90% effectiveness while awake. I decided to give up for the following reasons, between 2am – 7am it was hard because:

- the missus was asleep so I had to creep around the house quietly

- the house was cold!

- I was pretty bored!

There isn’t much to do between the hours of 2am – 7am apart from work, and after a full day of work anyway that was the last thing I wanted to do!

I’ve got to say though getting into the routine I found pretty easy to get used to – but then I generally work and sleep odd hours anyway. There were a number of great positives from doing this routine:

- I got a hell of a lot of work done over the three days!

- 3.5 hours between a sleep is a great period just to focus on a single bit of work. Due to being able to break the day up into sizeable chunks and focusing on one product/task during that period I was able to move a number of things along a good amount.

Overall conclusion – if I had a big deadline impending that needed a lot of work to do – I would definitely consider doing this pattern again. Oh and also if I was single! :-) I have decided to try to segment my day more though to focus on specific tasks so I think I have learnt enough from this try out to see if it was worth it.

Print | posted on Friday, November 21, 2008 1:04 PM |

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# re: Sleep experiment finished

Very interesting. My brother tried the same thing while in college. He came to a similar conclusion. Your findings are interesting though. I may give it a try near my next deadline...pending approval from my wife. ;)
11/21/2008 2:14 PM | Rick Kierner
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# re: Sleep experiment finished

Interesting results.

I am going to do a slightly different chunking when I try the same thing. I want to go with two 2-hour work blocks with 1 hour of rest (time with my wife, eating, etc.) between sleep. As such I will get five hours of waking time, one hour of sleep.

During my time in the military we did an experiment on sleep depravation. We used 15 minutes sleep time every 8 hours. Needless to say, productivity went down the drain, but I also noticed that production seemed to level off and even rise a bit towards the end of the week long experiment. I have no percentage, but it does support the idea that you get used to less sleep.

.b
11/21/2008 2:26 PM | Bjørn Furuknap
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# re: Sleep experiment finished

This was never going to work with the amount of golf you play Nick!
11/23/2008 8:38 PM | Matt Taylor
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# re: Sleep experiment finished

seriously stoopid thing to do...but in fashion somehow. saw a tv documentary on a guy doing same thing. he went jogging during nite and cooking - preparing meals for daytime.

i see you opted for 3.5 h between sleep. i agree that it makes sense following the .NET versions on this and 1.1, 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5 between sleep should keep you in tune with the library :)
11/26/2008 1:10 PM | nollkoll

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