This is one of the reasons I hate the eight-hour work day. Between that and all of the other shit you have to do in a day (commute, chores, eating, exercise etc.), it seems like there's little to no opportunity to just have a life. I know it sounds like first world problems (people used to work 100 hour weeks), but I think our culture needs to change before we can really put the onus on people to improve their sleeping habits. I'd love to get 7-9 hours of sleep, but I just don't have the time.
I hear people talk about optimizing one's day to be more productive and "get more done in your day" so often...but honestly, between work, family responsibilities, working out a little in the gym, getting involved in side projects (either "working on the car", or working on side dev project), maybe some civic community involvement, social visits (the occasional beer with a buddy), etc...it just feels like something has to give...and in my case, its the number of hours of sleep.
Perhaps i'm naive or too idealistic, but will the coming hordes of robots and associated automation help society by giving us all more time to ourselves - either for more/appropriate hours of sleep, or to spend on the activities i noted above? Or...maybe society - or should i say our capitalistic society - will "see" the unused bandwidth of our days made available by these robots, and insert more commitments to "fill our days"?
Sorry, i didn't get enough sleep last night, so am a little cranky. ;-)
Actually, studies have shown that hunter-gatherer societies spent much less than 40h/week "working" and had more leisure time than we do. It's just recent history that's an anomaly...
>I know it sounds like first world problems (people used to work 100 hour weeks)
People also used to work much less back in the day -- well, except sharecroppers, slaves and the very poor. This changed with the advent of the industrial age.
Farming work is (or used to be, before modern farming techniques) seasonal, and can be quite very light for the better part of the year. Professions like doctor, store owner, merchant etc didn't require anyone to sit 8+ hours straight in some cubicle. Shops (in 19th century Paris or Chicago or London etc) weren't optimized to serve tons of customers as fast as possible like a modern chain. Small towns and villages -- where most of the population (the rural) in any country lived before 19th century -- were far more leisurely too.
And as somebody already pointed "studies have shown that hunter-gatherer societies spent much less than 40h/week "working" and had more leisure time than we do".
Heck, to Romans and Ancient Greeks being hard at work was only fit for a slave -- not a citizen.
Four sixes or three eights feels like about the right balance, to me. It'd be the point at which a working professional could plausibly and in a non-trying-to-make-a-point way respond with something other than their job to the question, "so, what do you do?" It also might be just enough time off to let a working couple also homeschool their kids (they'd still need a daycare or some kind of parent-free activity or something some of the time, though) without running themselves entirely ragged.
You’re not imagining it. With 8 hours of sleep and a 9 hour work day plus all the other things that are effectively ‘required’, we are left with about 4 free hrs per weekday in a very optimistic scenario (commute is 30 minutes each way, you’re really fast with your bathroom routine, you down breakfast super quick, dinner and lunch are 30 mins each, etc).
The upper limit of achievable ‘free’ time per week is about 25% of total time (42 hrs). Most people don’t get nearly that much.
In that 25%, you need to fit: socialization, child care, parental care, leisure, events, learning, hobbies, planning, physical activity, non-essential shopping, medical care, etc.
What’s amazing is that we’ve collectively inflicted this state of affairs upon ourselves. Generally speaking, no one’s boss has it any better than their subordinates (usually they have it worse) - if you keep iterating by that logic, you end up in a loop because you eventually get to shareholders, investors, and customers.
And then the picture gets even more bleak when you realize people are averaging something like 3-4 hours per day on waste like TV and social media.
I think the most annoying part of the 8 hour work day is that a vast majority of people aren't actually working close to 8 hours. There's a lot of talking and looking at mindless stuff. My friend worked for IBM in the finance department and he streamed every world cup game. Got a promotion too.
for me personally the bigger issue is the actual 9-5ish work hours. I'm way more productive later in the day, so if the schedule would allow something like a Noon-4 pm/break/8 pm -midnight type breakdown I'm all for that. this is sometimes possible with telecommuting arrangements, whenever I'm able to do that I'm more productive, more rested and feel like my personal work/life balance is better.
Many advanced nations outside the United States (talking mainly about Europe) have learned long ago that the eight hour workday is too much. But in many places in the United States, an eight hour workday would be considered quite short. The other issue is annual vacation time; it's surprisingly short on average in United States compared to most other places.
I agree with you completely, but you didn't even mention kids. The other stuff, chores, eating, exercise, and so on, can be moved around in time, but kids require constant attention in the moment even when they are a few years old. I'm lucky to get an hour in the evening for me time efter the kids go to sleep, not even enough to watch a full movie if I want 8 hours of sleep. This is every day of the week, since they don't sleep in on weekends but wake up even earlier.
If I don't get to to stuff I enjoy every day I'm miserable, so I usually play video games past bed time and pay for it by walking around in a fog at work. A day with doing something fun feels like a wasted day, like a day closer to the grave with nothing to show for it.
It's not healthy living like this, but the only way I see doing anything different is by skipping doing anything just for fun. I look forward to when the kids are teenagers and I can relax again. /s
You nailed it! Everybody expects something from us - our partners, bosses, children... We also have needs and expectations - we need to exercise etc. How should we find time for all this working eight hours a day (realistically - at least 10 hours as most people are commuting. You wake up, go to work, get back, try to do your best at whatever you need to do... No wonder people sacrifice their sleep.
Working remotely has helped me a lot (cutting commuting). I work 8 hours, eat, exercise and get 8 hours of sleep. My wife who isn't working does more chores than I do (although I help a lot during the weekend). My only complain is that outside of exercising I have very little freetime, but that's mainly because I spend lots of time with my kids.
Do something about it bro. If you want something you gotta take it. Nobody is gonna come offering you a dream work week. But the catch 22 is you gotta lose some sleep to find time to develop some systems to make passive income
Totally on board with this. I'm currently looking for a 1/2 time contract gig, mostly because that's about all I want to work in conjunction with running a household and raising two kids.
One important thing the article doesn't cover: we now have good reason to suspect that chronic sleep deprivation can cause brain damage. Not just a long term decrease in function, but actual cellular damage.
In a major triumph of medicine, we now know that brain cells shrink during sleep (about 60% in rats), allowing cerebrospinal fluid to flow about 10 times as fast [1] [2], helping to cycle out built up toxins and waste products and eventually drain them into the bloodstream. It was previously a medical mystery how the brain was able to eliminate toxins without being connected to the lymphatic system (although it's since been shown that the brain is directly connected to the lymphatic system to some degree as well [2])
As far as I know, it's not proven that this contributes to the cognitive effects of chronic sleep deprivation. But it would make an awful lot of sense, and also help explain why sleep debt becomes more difficult to pay off the longer you let it sit around, and why the damage possibly even becomes permanent.
It's a tradeoff - I can go home and spend more social time, leisure time and put more personal time into my projects if I sleep less. The 2-3 hours of extra time I get by sleeping like crap allows me to do things I wouldn't otherwise get to do. Productivity couldn't improve these if there's no time left in the day to do them.
It costs me at work, I'm sure of it, but it hasn't gotten me fired or even significantly prevented me from doing my job, so why would I change it? There's no need to be obsessed with scraping every last ounce of productivity out of myself at work. I like my job, but feel no obligation for that.
Because you’re doing long-term damage to your brain?
Now, it’s possible that you’re not, and the brain can heal itself, but that’s why I try and get enough sleep. It disturbs me to think that the impossibly complex biomechanical machine in my head is slogging through excess waste products to try and crank out acceptable performance.
> It costs me at work, I'm sure of it, but it hasn't gotten me fired or even significantly prevented me from doing my job, so why would I change it?
That's exactly it, it's a lose-lose. Honestly, I think it's the number one thing I look for when weighing a job offer: if I spend 5 hours a day writing high quality code, will anyone care if I take off after? I'd rather have time to go home, go to the gym, relax, and get 9 hours of sleep. I hate the feeling of just being at the office because I feel like I should. It makes me happier and honestly, over the long-term, my work output is better than when I was working 10 hour days.
You're approaching productivity from the wrong angle. It's not about producing more, and especially not producing more while tired... it's about doing less unnecessary work. This requires thought, and is easier with a full night's sleep.
If you are X% less productive you will be able to charge X% less for your work, on average, so you would need to work longer hours for the same pay. You might also be shortening your life by not sleeping enough, perhaps by a larger amount than you're gaining by sleeping less. That is clearly the case in the limit of not sleeping at all -- you would shorten your life to a month at best, not to mention that the quality of life would go down.
If you feel groggy in the morning or just not well–rested even after 7-8 hours sleep, get your sinuses & lungs checked.
Could be sleep apnea, but in my case I felt congested all the time. What I thought was allergies was actually the linings of my sinuses inflamed to the point of closing off air passages.
Unclear if the root cause in my case was acid-reflux into the sinus cavities or exposure to dust from ground zero.
The resulting surgery kind of sucked (free tip: don't have your sinuses roto-rootered in the winter) but ever since I've been able to sleep a solid 6-7 hours every night. I now wake up rested, don't feel groggy, typically without an alarm.
I don't you can generalize things like this. I am sure there are people who can get by on 6 hours or less naturally. But the problem starts when people who need more try force themselves to sleep less. I have done a lot experimentation with this and had to accept that the only sustainable way for me is to sleep around 8 hours every night. It would be cool if I could make do with 4 but it's just not in me.
I can't be alone in being exhausted at these studies. Doctors and Lawyers have spent the better part of the last century working on little to no sleep. Academics too. As an engineer, I would regularly work through little sleep because the process of loading a large project into my head to work on it would take more time than the gains from being more well rested. I'm older now, and no longer work as an engineer. I value my sleep and appreciate how much more I can task-switch on a good nights rest, but the idea that I'm not being productive when I'm grinding through work that has to get done and I'm tired seems an overwritten idea.
I'm not arguing against rest and recharging and clearing your mind. I just don't see what these articles are trying to prove. When I was in college I had several stints of no sleep days to finish projects. Even into my early engineering career, I once billed 40 hours straight. Was I as "productive" per minute for that entire time as if I had slept through 5 nights? No. Would the work have gotten done faster than those 40 hours if I had slept for 8 hours in the middle a few times? No. I had a deadline, and there was nothing getting around the work needing to be done.
The argument seems to be against a constant sprinting mode, which I don't think any company employs. Humans burn out after continuous work for weeks, sometimes months. But a week or 3 of little to no sleep to get through everything you need to? It's worked for a long time. Arguably building up muscle memory while forcing rote things to be learned while on little sleep works. What are we trying to prove by this? That "the man" is out to abuse workers? Of course he is. But did anyone make partner at a law firm by claiming he's going to more productive by working less? If you're goal is work life balance, go ahead. But if you're goal is to excel in a field, then it probably involves some sleep deprivation. PG wrote an article about the reason startups were suited for youth is that you could push through unreasonable hours to crank a lot of life into fewer days.
Sorry for the rant...just wondering if I'm alone in thinking this
If you're saying that in the short term, short-term thinking works, sure. If you're in college and are doing a bunch of work that doesn't matter to deadlines that are entirely made up, sure, you can get away with it.
You claim that doctors do fine without enough sleep, but even doctors don't claim that any more. Doctor friends tell me it's a big focus for reform. [1] And in areas where safety is even more important, like piloting planes, they take mandatory rest even more seriously.
Software is mostly not life-critical, but I think it's uniquely bad in this regard. Doctors can bury their mistakes, but version control systems preserve ours forever. It's too easy to be negatively productive in software, and enormously easier if you're not getting enough sleep.
I feel like my natural body clock is a 28-hour day. If I have no reason to get up I'll sleep for about 10 hours, but then I'm not ready to sleep again for about 18 hours.
I'm guessing the 10 hours is just making up for sleep debt and that might taper off if I could sleep as much as I wanted every night. But the realities of life (kids in school, work, kid's activities, etc.) mean that I have to be awake by about 6:45am and being in bed and asleep before 10:00 just doesn't happen very often either.
I feel like when I get 8-9 I am much more productive and have a much better mood. Seven for me is sort of the point where I can go throughout the day but I will be distracted. Six or less is really bad for me.
I really notice when I get less sleep I make a bunch more comments on HN / reddit or use Twitter much more.
I'm much more interested in why a body needs an amount of sleep, what processes it is conducting, and how you can affect those processes.
What happens in the 7th hour that didn't happen in the 6th? If it's a fourth REM cycle, why do we need 4? What does the fourth do that the third didn't? Why do REM cycles take that long? Can you make them take more or less time? Can you determine lack of sleep from a brain scan? Can you tell the difference between a 6th hour brain and a 7th hour brain? Does anything you eat or do during a day affect how long this process takes? What about hydration / nutrition?
I'm sure these are all answerable, but I'm not sure most people know the answers, and this article certainly doesn't get us any closer to understanding.
This article isn't exactly a presentation of research. Several of those answerable questions will probably be worth Nobel Prizes for the people who can answer them. This is fundamentally a puff piece with a sleep expert promoting his new general audience book on sleep health (Not discounting the tips, or his expertise, but this is obviously not a research paper). Several of the sleep hygiene tips he gives are things that aren't really settled AFAIK in the field, possibly why he even specifically mentions "practicing what he preaches" in that last question. He's preaching at least as much as talking about settled science.
I think the headline is misleading. Let's say I stay up late to do X, Y and/or Z. These things to mean have meaning. In doing them I feel a sense of accomplishment. I've been productive.
Now I show up to work the next day. Certainly less sleep has some effect on me. But that doesn't devalue the increased productivity from the previous evening.
The brain is a limited resource. There might be occasional short term hacks/cheats. But on average you'll have X gallons in the mental tank. This is true. If you spend that at home then yes you will be "less productive" at work.
Maybe I'm weird, but I've never deluded myself about the impact of a lack of sleep. My entire life I've strived to get 7.5 to 8 hours a night. I'm not that successful lately, but I make it a priority.
What I don't get are people that brag about not getting much sleep. It's clearly unhealthy. Would you brag about your poor eating habits? Or not following a medication regimen?
I know the science is still early, but I have no doubt that poor sleep has a significant, long-term, permanent impact on health.
Most of the problems being discussed here in this thread regarding work hours per week, commute times, finding time for leisure and exercise and family time, the time spent dropping off kids at school, etc -- there are mostly unique to America. Americans could really learn a lot about how successful you can be despite spending less time at work, as well as less time fretting about other things, by looking at any of many countries on the continent of Europe, who offer a much better work/life balance but with no sacrifice on work output.
Some of the most talented and productive developers I know are in the Netherlands, France and Germany, and have a lifestyle that would be considered impossible by many in the States.
The brain needs time to recharge, time away from "work", time to think about work without actually doing work, and the punch that gets packed into a shorter work day can be much greater if the brain is working at optimum capacity, which usually doesn't happen if it is taxed for loads of hours day after day after day.
For me personally, my best ideas come when I am away from a computer, and my brain is free to wander. The more time I sit at a computer, ironically the less likely good ideas will come. Most work environments in the States have not learned this yet.
>> If you were not to set an alarm clock, would you sleep past it? If the answer is yes, then there is clearly more sleep that is needed.
Totally wrong. I just finished 4 months of military training. Sleep deprivation was part of the training. We were constantly sleep deprived. It impacted our performance, that was the point. That said, I'm one of those people who always seems to get up 2 minutes before the alarm. Even in my sleep-deprived state, less than four hours a night for weeks, I still woke up before my alarm.
Your point, although interesting, does not invalidate the quote.
Let A be « you would sleep past the alarm clock without it » and B « you are sleep-deprived »
They say A → B. You say false since I got B and not(A).
A → B does not imply B → A which would be proved false by your case.
Why not sleep 8 hours a day if needed (Personally, I'm even more useless on less than 7-8 hrs of sleep)?
I am sure you can reinvent the wheel and then some in what's left. People are productive when they are productive, you can come up with the idea to change the world in 60 mins...or never in your lifetime.
If Einstein had lived to 150 it's not a given that his contribution to the would would have 2X...
I recognize the thrust of this argument, and anecdotally agree with it from my experience,but it's not practical advice. Work 12 hours, spend at least 30 minutes each way commuting,work out, prepare and eat meals, and you're at pretty nearly 15 hours, without counting preparing for work. Sure,you have time for sleeping 8 hours,but only if you eschew any personal life and find your work sufficiently exciting to not see any need for recreation/fun all week. Dropping to about 6.5 hours of sleep at least doubles time for those things each work day.
I've tried maintaining 8 hours of sleep daily in such conditions. What I've found is that I'm productive for two days. By Tuesday or Wednesday night, I'm frustrated and bored, and spend 3 or 4 hours doing something interesting and, bam, week derailed. For me, 6.5 hours is the compromise that works. Plus, I sleep 9 hours on Friday and Saturday nights.
> the Foundation suggests anywhere from six hours to 11 hours of sleep per night for individuals between the ages of 18 and 25 may be suitable, or six hours to 10 hours for those between the ages of 26 and 64.
A four to five hour deviation is quite significant. That's a difference of 80% between the most amount of sleep needed and the least.
> "I suppose the rule of thumb in adults is about seven to eight hours, but is that based on any really solid science? I would sort of say not," said Russell Foster, professor of circadian neuroscience and head of the Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute at the University of Oxford.
This is the first time I've ever read about sleep problems caused by a simple glass of wine before bed. About ten years ago some study came out linking red wine to heart health, and I remember one smug kid at school making fun of the Mormons because the article had just "proven their religion wrong". Meanwhile health organizations were recommending you not start drinking because it's also addictive. I've heard that the drinking culture in the US has changed lately, as it is being seen as less and less healthy (I've been abroad for about 5 years).
The genetic variability of humans seems large enough that simple rules about sleep, like nutrition, are probably wrong for many people. Get more sleep if you are tired all the time? Maybe that would work.
Sleep need is variable, work is variable, motivation is variable. It's more likely that sleep is a spectrum, hence the 8.34% variance in required minimum sleep for adults, or how general quality of health affects ability to maintain sleep. It's even possible that sleep has nothing to do with our health and productivity other than being an indicator of it, and not necessarily a cause for it. Thanks, pseudo-scientific studies.
This is all true, but I think it's worthwhile to be very skeptical about your assumption of how much sleep is healthy for you. Everyone in these threads assumes that they are one of the special few who does perfectly fine on 5 hours of sleep.
[+] [-] _qbjt|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mxuribe|8 years ago|reply
I hear people talk about optimizing one's day to be more productive and "get more done in your day" so often...but honestly, between work, family responsibilities, working out a little in the gym, getting involved in side projects (either "working on the car", or working on side dev project), maybe some civic community involvement, social visits (the occasional beer with a buddy), etc...it just feels like something has to give...and in my case, its the number of hours of sleep.
Perhaps i'm naive or too idealistic, but will the coming hordes of robots and associated automation help society by giving us all more time to ourselves - either for more/appropriate hours of sleep, or to spend on the activities i noted above? Or...maybe society - or should i say our capitalistic society - will "see" the unused bandwidth of our days made available by these robots, and insert more commitments to "fill our days"?
Sorry, i didn't get enough sleep last night, so am a little cranky. ;-)
[+] [-] lutorm|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldtea|8 years ago|reply
People also used to work much less back in the day -- well, except sharecroppers, slaves and the very poor. This changed with the advent of the industrial age.
Farming work is (or used to be, before modern farming techniques) seasonal, and can be quite very light for the better part of the year. Professions like doctor, store owner, merchant etc didn't require anyone to sit 8+ hours straight in some cubicle. Shops (in 19th century Paris or Chicago or London etc) weren't optimized to serve tons of customers as fast as possible like a modern chain. Small towns and villages -- where most of the population (the rural) in any country lived before 19th century -- were far more leisurely too.
And as somebody already pointed "studies have shown that hunter-gatherer societies spent much less than 40h/week "working" and had more leisure time than we do".
Heck, to Romans and Ancient Greeks being hard at work was only fit for a slave -- not a citizen.
[+] [-] ako|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ashark|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sp527|8 years ago|reply
The upper limit of achievable ‘free’ time per week is about 25% of total time (42 hrs). Most people don’t get nearly that much.
In that 25%, you need to fit: socialization, child care, parental care, leisure, events, learning, hobbies, planning, physical activity, non-essential shopping, medical care, etc.
What’s amazing is that we’ve collectively inflicted this state of affairs upon ourselves. Generally speaking, no one’s boss has it any better than their subordinates (usually they have it worse) - if you keep iterating by that logic, you end up in a loop because you eventually get to shareholders, investors, and customers.
And then the picture gets even more bleak when you realize people are averaging something like 3-4 hours per day on waste like TV and social media.
[+] [-] leekyle333|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Xeoncross|8 years ago|reply
Many people still work +100 hour weeks - just not all for their primary paying jobs. Raising children, side projects, home repair, etc..
[+] [-] schmidty|8 years ago|reply
chores - have less stuff to maintain.
eating - not sure what can be done here.
exercise - look into tabata or hiit. you can workout 2x20min a week.
you can also find way to be more efficient with your activities to cut off time on each one, even if you keep it.
sure none of these suggestions is without cost. but these suggestions can be enacted to the end goal of more time (for sleep or whatever)
[+] [-] ChemicalWarfare|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hellofunk|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scandinavegan|8 years ago|reply
I agree with you completely, but you didn't even mention kids. The other stuff, chores, eating, exercise, and so on, can be moved around in time, but kids require constant attention in the moment even when they are a few years old. I'm lucky to get an hour in the evening for me time efter the kids go to sleep, not even enough to watch a full movie if I want 8 hours of sleep. This is every day of the week, since they don't sleep in on weekends but wake up even earlier.
If I don't get to to stuff I enjoy every day I'm miserable, so I usually play video games past bed time and pay for it by walking around in a fog at work. A day with doing something fun feels like a wasted day, like a day closer to the grave with nothing to show for it.
It's not healthy living like this, but the only way I see doing anything different is by skipping doing anything just for fun. I look forward to when the kids are teenagers and I can relax again. /s
[+] [-] dvfjsdhgfv|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xtrimsky1234|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mlcrypto|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sbarg|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] uoaei|8 years ago|reply
Sleep is a vital part of life. You are not missing out on life if you sleep--you are living.
[+] [-] a_lieb|8 years ago|reply
In a major triumph of medicine, we now know that brain cells shrink during sleep (about 60% in rats), allowing cerebrospinal fluid to flow about 10 times as fast [1] [2], helping to cycle out built up toxins and waste products and eventually drain them into the bloodstream. It was previously a medical mystery how the brain was able to eliminate toxins without being connected to the lymphatic system (although it's since been shown that the brain is directly connected to the lymphatic system to some degree as well [2])
As far as I know, it's not proven that this contributes to the cognitive effects of chronic sleep deprivation. But it would make an awful lot of sense, and also help explain why sleep debt becomes more difficult to pay off the longer you let it sit around, and why the damage possibly even becomes permanent.
[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24429-sleep-boosts-br...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glymphatic_system
[+] [-] rightos|8 years ago|reply
It's a tradeoff - I can go home and spend more social time, leisure time and put more personal time into my projects if I sleep less. The 2-3 hours of extra time I get by sleeping like crap allows me to do things I wouldn't otherwise get to do. Productivity couldn't improve these if there's no time left in the day to do them.
It costs me at work, I'm sure of it, but it hasn't gotten me fired or even significantly prevented me from doing my job, so why would I change it? There's no need to be obsessed with scraping every last ounce of productivity out of myself at work. I like my job, but feel no obligation for that.
[+] [-] oliveshell|8 years ago|reply
Now, it’s possible that you’re not, and the brain can heal itself, but that’s why I try and get enough sleep. It disturbs me to think that the impossibly complex biomechanical machine in my head is slogging through excess waste products to try and crank out acceptable performance.
[+] [-] ng12|8 years ago|reply
That's exactly it, it's a lose-lose. Honestly, I think it's the number one thing I look for when weighing a job offer: if I spend 5 hours a day writing high quality code, will anyone care if I take off after? I'd rather have time to go home, go to the gym, relax, and get 9 hours of sleep. I hate the feeling of just being at the office because I feel like I should. It makes me happier and honestly, over the long-term, my work output is better than when I was working 10 hour days.
[+] [-] itamarst|8 years ago|reply
https://codewithoutrules.com/2017/10/04/technical-skills-pro...
[+] [-] jules|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] epc|8 years ago|reply
Could be sleep apnea, but in my case I felt congested all the time. What I thought was allergies was actually the linings of my sinuses inflamed to the point of closing off air passages.
Unclear if the root cause in my case was acid-reflux into the sinus cavities or exposure to dust from ground zero.
The resulting surgery kind of sucked (free tip: don't have your sinuses roto-rootered in the winter) but ever since I've been able to sleep a solid 6-7 hours every night. I now wake up rested, don't feel groggy, typically without an alarm.
[+] [-] maxxxxx|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ramirez60|8 years ago|reply
I'm not arguing against rest and recharging and clearing your mind. I just don't see what these articles are trying to prove. When I was in college I had several stints of no sleep days to finish projects. Even into my early engineering career, I once billed 40 hours straight. Was I as "productive" per minute for that entire time as if I had slept through 5 nights? No. Would the work have gotten done faster than those 40 hours if I had slept for 8 hours in the middle a few times? No. I had a deadline, and there was nothing getting around the work needing to be done.
The argument seems to be against a constant sprinting mode, which I don't think any company employs. Humans burn out after continuous work for weeks, sometimes months. But a week or 3 of little to no sleep to get through everything you need to? It's worked for a long time. Arguably building up muscle memory while forcing rote things to be learned while on little sleep works. What are we trying to prove by this? That "the man" is out to abuse workers? Of course he is. But did anyone make partner at a law firm by claiming he's going to more productive by working less? If you're goal is work life balance, go ahead. But if you're goal is to excel in a field, then it probably involves some sleep deprivation. PG wrote an article about the reason startups were suited for youth is that you could push through unreasonable hours to crank a lot of life into fewer days.
Sorry for the rant...just wondering if I'm alone in thinking this
[+] [-] wpietri|8 years ago|reply
If you're saying that in the short term, short-term thinking works, sure. If you're in college and are doing a bunch of work that doesn't matter to deadlines that are entirely made up, sure, you can get away with it.
You claim that doctors do fine without enough sleep, but even doctors don't claim that any more. Doctor friends tell me it's a big focus for reform. [1] And in areas where safety is even more important, like piloting planes, they take mandatory rest even more seriously.
Software is mostly not life-critical, but I think it's uniquely bad in this regard. Doctors can bury their mistakes, but version control systems preserve ours forever. It's too easy to be negatively productive in software, and enormously easier if you're not getting enough sleep.
[1] http://www.bcmj.org/article/sleep-deprivation-among-physicia...
[+] [-] ams6110|8 years ago|reply
I'm guessing the 10 hours is just making up for sleep debt and that might taper off if I could sleep as much as I wanted every night. But the realities of life (kids in school, work, kid's activities, etc.) mean that I have to be awake by about 6:45am and being in bed and asleep before 10:00 just doesn't happen very often either.
[+] [-] zitterbewegung|8 years ago|reply
I really notice when I get less sleep I make a bunch more comments on HN / reddit or use Twitter much more.
[+] [-] imustbeevil|8 years ago|reply
What happens in the 7th hour that didn't happen in the 6th? If it's a fourth REM cycle, why do we need 4? What does the fourth do that the third didn't? Why do REM cycles take that long? Can you make them take more or less time? Can you determine lack of sleep from a brain scan? Can you tell the difference between a 6th hour brain and a 7th hour brain? Does anything you eat or do during a day affect how long this process takes? What about hydration / nutrition?
I'm sure these are all answerable, but I'm not sure most people know the answers, and this article certainly doesn't get us any closer to understanding.
[+] [-] cavanasm|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pizza|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] komali2|8 years ago|reply
....
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:D
[+] [-] chiefalchemist|8 years ago|reply
Now I show up to work the next day. Certainly less sleep has some effect on me. But that doesn't devalue the increased productivity from the previous evening.
The brain is a limited resource. There might be occasional short term hacks/cheats. But on average you'll have X gallons in the mental tank. This is true. If you spend that at home then yes you will be "less productive" at work.
[+] [-] refurb|8 years ago|reply
What I don't get are people that brag about not getting much sleep. It's clearly unhealthy. Would you brag about your poor eating habits? Or not following a medication regimen?
I know the science is still early, but I have no doubt that poor sleep has a significant, long-term, permanent impact on health.
[+] [-] hellofunk|8 years ago|reply
Some of the most talented and productive developers I know are in the Netherlands, France and Germany, and have a lifestyle that would be considered impossible by many in the States.
The brain needs time to recharge, time away from "work", time to think about work without actually doing work, and the punch that gets packed into a shorter work day can be much greater if the brain is working at optimum capacity, which usually doesn't happen if it is taxed for loads of hours day after day after day.
For me personally, my best ideas come when I am away from a computer, and my brain is free to wander. The more time I sit at a computer, ironically the less likely good ideas will come. Most work environments in the States have not learned this yet.
[+] [-] sandworm101|8 years ago|reply
Totally wrong. I just finished 4 months of military training. Sleep deprivation was part of the training. We were constantly sleep deprived. It impacted our performance, that was the point. That said, I'm one of those people who always seems to get up 2 minutes before the alarm. Even in my sleep-deprived state, less than four hours a night for weeks, I still woke up before my alarm.
[+] [-] Rasco|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tryingagainbro|8 years ago|reply
I am sure you can reinvent the wheel and then some in what's left. People are productive when they are productive, you can come up with the idea to change the world in 60 mins...or never in your lifetime.
If Einstein had lived to 150 it's not a given that his contribution to the would would have 2X...
[+] [-] tbihl|8 years ago|reply
I've tried maintaining 8 hours of sleep daily in such conditions. What I've found is that I'm productive for two days. By Tuesday or Wednesday night, I'm frustrated and bored, and spend 3 or 4 hours doing something interesting and, bam, week derailed. For me, 6.5 hours is the compromise that works. Plus, I sleep 9 hours on Friday and Saturday nights.
[+] [-] gejjaxxita|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imustbeevil|8 years ago|reply
A four to five hour deviation is quite significant. That's a difference of 80% between the most amount of sleep needed and the least.
> "I suppose the rule of thumb in adults is about seven to eight hours, but is that based on any really solid science? I would sort of say not," said Russell Foster, professor of circadian neuroscience and head of the Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute at the University of Oxford.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/vv7eqx/why-do-dif...
[+] [-] SebNag_|8 years ago|reply
> Prescribing one amount of sleep for every kind of person seems very obviously wrong.
That's, AFAIK, not.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] ryanbrunner|8 years ago|reply