WILearned
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Update & Notes on the Sleep Video
🕑 Added 2017-01-29 01:31:26 +0000 UTC Hey everyone,I know I've been a bit inconsistent with the Patreon page. I really appreciate the support. The money is great and helps me afford to spend more time on this and buy more books (Just dropped 100 bucks at Half Price books in Austin, TX before coming back to Japan) , but more importantly it's very motivating to know that the content has been compelling enough that y'all are willing to contribute to my page. It's just me working on the videos and they take a long time, so this kind of motivation is really important for me. Thank you again.
I'm still working on getting the videos out at regular intervals, but I'm going to post on here as much as I can as well.
Notes on the Sleep Video:
While I was at my recruiting job, my aim was to just output as much as possible and the work was relatively straight forward so I didn't notice how sleep was affecting me. [Wake up at 5AM, exercise, coffee, go to work, answer emails, make phone calls, coffee, go to meetings, draft contracts, make phone calls, coffee, write emails, coffee, more contracts, get home at 10PM, watch Netflix, go to sleep around 12PM] After a while it became straightforward enough that I could do it on semi-autopilot. I obviously didn't feel as good with less sleep but I figured as long as I was awake and working I was being more productive.
Then, I got into this and approached it with a slightly more relaxed attitude (as I knew too rigid of an approach wasn't conducive to creativty) but didn't prioritize sleep. By this point I was more mindful in general and very aware of what thoughts I was thinking, how I was acting, how I was performing differently from yesterday and so on. I started to realize "Wow, I'm like a drunk person when I haven't slept enough." One day after poor sleep I found myself looking for my coffee scoop for about 10 minutes only to realize I threw it in the trash along with something else. Then I went to the station and was thinking "Where the hell is the chuo-line?" but the chuo line is the line I take after taking the train to another station. I wasn't a bumbling idiot staggering around with my eyes half closed, I actually felt pretty sharp, but I would just have these brief moments of "What the hell am I doing?". Despite feeling OK, I wasn't acting OK and I could only realize that I wasn't at 100% until after I had one of these brain-lags. (This is what I was getting at at 7:56 in the sleep video )
Sometimes when I’m reading something out of a book, if there was an interesting part that I don’t want to forget, then I will type that passage out verbatim on google docs. This makes easy to find later and at the same time (I hope) it serves as practice to improve my typing speed. When I haven't slept well, I've noticed that I type a bit slower and have to spend more time hitting the delete button. So even when I don’t have to think at all about what I’m typing, I am making these small mistakes and typing slower in general. Then I'm even slower when I'm trying to come up with good examples or figuring out how lay pieces of information out into a compelling narrative. Basically I realized that if I'm sacrificing sleep to squeeze another hour out of the day, it's pointless if my productivity has slowed down to 85% capacity.
Arianna Huffington's "The Sleep Revolution" was annoyingly dense with statistics and research results, but it did drive home to me how widespread poor sleep is. If statistics and statements like Sleep deprivation “adds up to more than eleven days of lost productivity per year per worker.” really speak to you, then I recommend checking that one out. However, David Randall's "Dreamland" was a much more interesting read and talks a bit more the mechanisms behind sleep. If you want more practical and actionable advice, Shawn Stevenson's book "Sleep Smarter" is quite good.
Attached is the script for the video and some of the words are hyperlinked to the references I was using
Comments
Hey Jason, Thanks for mentioning that book, I hadn't heard of it before and it's on my list now. Sleep is still very interesting for me, especially polyphasic sleep because it's hard to find much scientific info. I think one reason polyphasic sleep (allegedly) works for so many people is because they stick to a super rigid schedule that the body can adapt to. A lot of what I've read suggests that once the body adapts to a very specific sleep schedule, it starts to speed up the process (as in "OK This bastard is only letting us sleep for 3 hours a night, let's kick into non-REM deep sleep immediately and go straight to REM after that") so more important functions are completed sooner than a person who would sleep on a "normal" schedule. I'm planning on trying the "everyman" sleep schedule after I develop some metrics to track my cognitive performance now so I can have a baseline to objectively measure against while I'm doing polyphasic. How is the 6core, 20nap working for you? I definitely see what you mean about the productivity, but what I'm concerned about are the non-measureable creative insights and lateral thinking that could be missed as a side effect of lost sleep. No doubt you can get more done on less sleep, but maybe you're missing out on great ideas in the process. Of course I don't know for sure which is why I want to learn a lot more about polyphasic and try it for myself. If you know about any good books/sources other than <a href="http://www.puredoxyk.com/index.php/polyphasic-sleep-information-portal/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://www.puredoxyk.com/index.php/polyphasic-sleep-information-portal/</a> for more information on the topic, please let me know. Cheers!
Hey loved the video. Sleep is something that's particularly interested me over the last few weeks. After reading deep work I started waking up at five and going straight to the office to get started on my work and the productivity has been amazing. I started doing this going to bed at midnight and within a week got insanely sick. I knew I had to change something, so I started a biphasic sleep schedule (6h core 20m nap) Wondering what you think about polyphasic in this context. Something interesting to consider: "Sleep deprivation “adds up to more than eleven days of lost productivity per year per worker." - but sleep itself adds up to so much lost productivity! If we can cut our sleep down to six from eight hours that's an entire month of time back per year! Jason
