Motivation

I’m not sure if I’ve posted this one before? But even if I have it’s worth re-watching.

What is it that motivates us? Plenty of companies I know treat the answer to this as a simple one – Money. The reality couldn’t be further from the truth…

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Caught in the wind

Caught in the wind

Caught in the wind, originally uploaded by landofshane.

Had a lovely weekend away in Iceland.Reminded me a lot of home.

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The future is where?

Years ago, I remember celebrating because I had successfully completed one of the ‘things I want to be able to do in the future’.

Without using a computer, i successfully found a product online, purchased it and picked it up. No ‘traditional’ online use required. The mobile world was looking more and more like a possibility.

The most astounding thing about this, is that this was only 2006. 5 years ago…

Interestingly this was the same year Sarah and I challenged each other to do all of our Christmas shopping online only (we failed, grandparent presents did not exist online in 2006).

Five years on, I’d like to provide a comparison. Christmas this year I broke my 3year old nieces spinning top. 5 minutes later without leaving the couch, on only my smartphone I had found an identical one, ordered it, paid for it on my credit card, and then paid my credit card balance off. Most interestingly I didn’t for a second think of this as any sort of challenge.

It’s made me think, the world is changing fast these days, we all know that. However when it comes down to it I think Humans are adapting so fast to the change that we generally underestimate how fast the change is happening.

Think about this for a second. There are no camera phone photos or videos of the 9/11 attacks, because camera phones didn’t exist yet.

If we are underestimating how fast things have changed, are we also setting our expectations of how fast things will move in the next 5 years?


This is the ‘partially related’ video which sparked this realisation.

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9.30am Day 3 – Experiment Concluded

My polyphasic sleep experiment has been called to a halt.

I know what your are thinking… only 2 days in? “So, was it a success? of a Failure?”

Well, we’ll get to that shortly.

I went into this experiment with 2 hypothesis, one being absolute failure on day 3 or 4 due to sleep deprivation the other being success.

Both were wrong, what I actually discovered was something unexpected.

I’m a bit disappointed it’s all over so soon, almost before the experiment had begun. However part of any experiment is keening your mind and eyes open for unexpected results and accepting these surprised when they come along.

The first two days have been relatively easy as sleep deprivation hasn’t really kicked in. This has gave me a unique opportunity that I hadn’t foreseen – a 2 day window to try Polyphasic sleep while also being productive.

It’s almost a honeymoon period where you can try a polyphasic cycle for free. Sure by the end I was tired, but it let me test my basic assumptions about this new sleep cycle without having to adjust fully.

Before I go on, let me just say that I know many poly sleepers will read this and laugh. They will have objections to the above like I wont have experienced the full benefits of being adjusted, the euphoria and time dilation that poly sleep brings… and they are probably correct. However I had set aims to achieve and this 2 day window has allowed me to test those.

For me, this test was about productivity.

My assumptions had been that the extra time at night would allow me to complete some of the computer work that I haven’t found time for.

So, what did I find?

The extra time at night was indeed perfect for achieving some work and I did manage to complete two specific coding projects I had set aside for these times… on face value, a success.

However, that’s only half the story.

My sleep cycle was designed around one core 3hr sleep and three 20min naps, giving a total sleep of 4hrs a day. This is where the theoretical and experimental diverged.

In reality, the 20min naps took more like 40min of my time. By the time I stopped what I was doing, set alarms, set the sleep track on the ipod going, etc, I was loosing a lot more time around the naps than I had budgeted. All up, I was actually taking around 5 1/2hrs to get my 4hrs sleep.

At this point I should point out that I normally only get around 6.5 to 7 hrs sleep, plus another 30min ‘lost’ time around this monophasic cycle.

So over all my actual productivity gains are looking like 2hrs per day.

Against this, I have had to look at what I need to do to achieve this 2hr gain:

  • Basically I am loosing 2hrs in the day with people contact, to achieve 4hrs solo time at night. For those of you that know me, you will know this isn’t a obvious fit with my personality
  • I had designed this sleep cycle to fit around work. This would mean taking one nap in my car for lunch time. Having tried this now this isn’t as easy as I had hoped and far less practical than I had imagined
  • I also found that my daytime job crept into my night time. As my afternoon nap gives me a forced break at the end of the work day. This meant on the days that things don’t go quite as planned I ended up having to do some work in my night period – further reducing the productivity gains I had hoped for
  • Finally, having to stop what I was doing every 5-6 hrs did not come at all naturally. I am more of a ‘keep going until it is complete’ types person and I found having to park jobs and pick them up 40min later was very inefficient. It surprised me how much of the jobs I had stored in short term memory and lost during the forced break – this lead to a higher level of re-work than I had hoped.

All in all, I think the real world productivity gains I would see post adaptation would be in the range of 30-90 minutes per day depending on the day. This differs significantly from my original 3hr-3.5hr target.

After two days it has became very obvious that for the level of gains I am seeing, do not outweigh the impact this cycle would have on the daily lives of those around me.

In fact, looking at this a different way, I think a better way to achieve these gains exists for me:

  • I often sleep in on the weekends to around 9am. Removing these will give an extra 6hrs each week.
  • Another 30-60min per day can easily be achieved through simple productivity gains and scheduling.
  • This would give a usable 8 – 10 hrs gains a week.
  • In addition, this experiment has shown I can do 1 or 2 nights a week with only 3hrs sleep when required to work on specific projects

So, given all that, I started to look down a different track: The Uberman Sleep cycle.

If the ‘Everyman’ cycle I had proposed isn’t going to given the productivity gains I am after then the 20min naps every 4hrs of Uberman is the obvious answer.

I think the Uberman cycle would still fall under my original aim of 4hrs ‘sleep’ even once the ‘lost time’ around the naps is added in.

After a fair bit of research and thinking, I think this could be the answer, however it simply isn’t practical for me at the moment at this stage in my life. I have a new job starting in 6 weeks time, and the Ubermans strict sleep times will not be compatible with this.

Based on the above, my experiment has been called to a halt with the following conclusions:

  • The everyman sleep cycle is unlikely to give me the productivity gains needed to justify the upset to our daily lives at this stage in my life.
  • After 2 days I believe adaptation will be tough, but achievable with the right motivation.
  • I would be willing to retry either Everyman or Uberman if there was a change in either the productivity achievable (i.e. if I ever run my own business where I could maximise the 4hrs alone at night) or if our daily lives changed in away that reduced the impact of the schedule (travelling, home based job etc).

This isn’t how I expected to finish this experiment – I’m almost a bit disappointed that it is over before the real trial of sleep deprivation has begun. None of my hypothesis had included the idea that the productivity gains from the everyman cycle wouldn’t be as great as I had theorised.

This was an experiment, and part of conducting experiments is accepting results that are unexpected.

I am still determined to try this cycle fully at some point in my life, but 2 days in it is clear that this isn’t that time. Curiosity alone is not enough to justify the effort and upset to our daily lives… so this experiment will have to wait until a different time in life when our circumstances make it easier to work around the upset.

I think I will declare this experiment a “successful failure”.

I learn’t what I needed out of it and will be better prepared when the right time comes.

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8am Day2

I had a really productive night in the early hours getting a load of actual work out of the way without any interruptions. Things were looking up.

However when the 6am nap rolled around, once again I just couldn’t get to sleep at all.

I am hoping that once my body finally works out what a nap is for, it will quickly adjust to REM sleep in these naps. If however I go through a prolonged period of not napping at all, or napping without REM for a period while the body gets used to napping, then this could crash and burn quite quickly.

I have so far found a couple of tools to help me on this journey – I have been using a ‘white noise’ recording which I found online. It’s a 26min recording of white noise designed to block out outside noises, after that 26min thre is a series of alarms/music etc in an ever increasing volume. I’m hoping that this will both help me get to sleep in my nap times and also help stop me over sleeping once I am asleep.

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3am Day 2

The alarm went off at 2.30am and I woke surprisingly easy, although I did find myself lying in bed wondering why am I doing this.

I can already see how most people end up sleeping to long during the transition period and how that would stuff things pretty quickly. Actually finding the motivation to get through each hour of these first few days is going to be critical.

I think the next couple of hours may be spent writing down some solid aims and ‘success criteria’ for this trial as that will almost certainly help me get out of bed from the next few sleeps when sleep deprivation takes hold.

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Day 1

So today was the chicken and egg question:

  • Do I start by staying up one night?
  • Or do I start by napping during the day

I went for option two, napping first.

So, the results of my first nap (12 noon) are in:

FAIL.

And nap two (6pm):

FAIL.

It strikes me that none of the things I’ve read about polyphasic sleep discuss how long it takes to learn to nap – they take it for granted that you can. Whereas I’ve never had a quick nap in my life…

Oh this could go horribly wrong. And to think I was nervous before – now I’m seriously worried about how I’m going to cope.

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Polyphasic Sleep

After many years of thinking about it, today is the day I’m going to start a polyphasic sleep pattern.

If you haven’t heard of it before, it’s described on wikipedia as:
Polyphasic Sleep, a term coined by early 20th century psychologist J.S. Szymanski,[1] refers to the practice of sleeping multiple times in a 24-hour period—usually more than two.

The concept is this:

  • Rather than sleeping for 8 hours a night, the body can be trained to sleep in small regular amounts
  • These small naps are more efficient than sleeping for 8 hours, so the total time asleep in a day can be reduced.

After lots of research, the pattern I have decided to go for is the Everyman schedule which consists of a core 3hour sleep, followed by 3 equally spaced 20min power naps throughout the day. This should be workable around my normal life to a reasonable extent.

Specifically, I’m aiming for a core sleep from 11pm – 2am, with naps at 6am, 12 noon and 6pm.

I have taken a few days off work to try and get through the initial adaptation period, although whether I’ll make it through the initial few days in one piece or not is yet to be seen.

Right now, before it all starts, I am feeling very nervous about the whole thing. I know I don’t cope well with a lack of sleep under normal conditions, so this experiment will be pushing the limits somewhat.

I have no idea what I am going to learn out of this… but regardless of whether I succeed in getting through this first weekend I’m sure I’ll learn something about my own limits.

This could be an interesting weekend.

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Camping time

We thought we’d do a last minute camping trip given it was looking like nice weekend.

We have had the full range of English weather; hot sun, wind, rain and cloudy.

Have had a real blast of a weekend!

Under Camping Skies

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The Polyphasic Sleep Idea

sun seeker

sun seeker, originally uploaded by landofshane.

I’ve been thinking for a while about trying a rather radical change.

I suppose you could say I’m from the school of thought of ‘if it isn’t broken, try breaking it’.

It’s the sort of thing most people will just dismiss as another crazy idea, but that’s never stood in my way before,

It is a thing called Polyphasic Sleep.

Whereas most people sleep for 8ish hours a night in one go, that actually isn’t the only way

In fact, sleeping multiple times a day for shorter periods is actually more efficient.

It’s possible to get by on only 2 hours sleep a day as long as you don’t mind sleeping for 20min every 4 hours.

I’ve always wanted to try it… sleep just seems so inefficient.

I broached the topic with S1 about a month ago and we are currently considering if it would be possible for me to do it without getting in the way of too much.

It looks as though the Everyman cycle may actually have a chance of fitting my current daily routine.

It involves a 3 hour core nap followed by three 20min naps.

Now would actually be a good time to give it a go as it would work well with my job (there is no such thing as jetlag)

But I’m rather apprehensive about the thought of actually trying it

Only time will tell if I actually ever end up giving it a go…

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