You asked in your latest dev log if anyone had figured out how to create more hours in the day. They have - Polyphasic sleep. You lose a week of productivity in exchange for 22 alert, useable hours every day; though it's really hard to get started.

A day 60 blog post of someone who has done it successfully.

There hasn't been a scientific study into polyphasic sleeping, but there are (self-) documented cases of it working well (as opposed to the conjecture of it's critics who haven't done it successfully).

Unfortunately, polyphasic sleep schedules basically segregate you from the rest of the world -- it's awfully inconvenient (not to mention dangerous) having to take 30 minute naps at work or out in public, and your schedule no longer fits with the rest of the world (except for other polyphasics). It's a tough tradeoff that many try, and end up not using.

I love the idea of polyphasic sleep, but I know I don't have the willpower to keep this up.
The gained time would be tremendous and open up so many possibilities... But if I can't be bothered to empty my mailbox most of the days, I don't think I'm up to trying something this challenging.

Reading that site did motivate me to make some changes though, a small step in the right direction perhaps. First thing I'll do, is getting up early.
My gf has already agreed to get up every day at 6am. She has trouble sleeping a lot, so I'm hoping this will work out for her too.

I believe in a different post, Josh said he tried a polyphasic schedule and it didn't work out too well for him.

There is actually yet another way.

If you were to work on a plane flying west, you'd have more hours per day!

Gazz wrote:There is actually yet another way.

If you were to work on a plane flying west, you'd have more hours per day!

It would catch up with you eventually though.

Like it caught up with Dorian Grey?

Chameleon wrote:You asked in your latest dev log if anyone had figured out how to create more hours in the day. They have - Polyphasic sleep. You lose a week of productivity in exchange for 22 alert, useable hours every day; though it's really hard to get started.

A day 60 blog post of someone who has done it successfully.

There hasn't been a scientific study into polyphasic sleeping, but there are (self-) documented cases of it working well (as opposed to the conjecture of it's critics who haven't done it successfully).

Yes, sadly, I have tried polyphasic sleep. My primary concern was the loss of my mental edge. A few days in to uberman I felt that I had lost my ability to think really deeply about code architecture. Sure, there were loads of hours to grind out the easy work, but I later found that the code I wrote during this time was not well-thought-out and was lacking a global view of the code.

Now, granted, I never got fully adjusted....so whether this would have changed after 1, 2 weeks is questionable. Unfortunately, it's a scary thing to feel that you are losing your mental capabilities...so I simply couldn't make it through the adjustment period. Maybe I will try again at some point

Gazz wrote:There is actually yet another way.

If you were to work on a plane flying west, you'd have more hours per day!

Yes, coding while sleep deprived (which is the first week of uberman) will result in mostly throwaway code, the week after that will be sub-par work, improving until you end up with potentially better work at ~4 weeks in (and continuing at that improved level until you stop sleeping polyphasically). Polyphasic sleeping isn't working constantly in a sleep deprived state, but forcing yourself to adapt so that you aren't sleep deprived with only 2 hours of (strictly regimented) sleep per day.

It's entirely impractical for you, as you've made yourself accountable to us for every day of work you do (the dev logs are great, by the way ), to take a week of sleep deprivation and no productive work, but if you could pull it off you would get the more hours in a day that you're looking for.

Dorian Grey is a good reference.

Also think about Fight Club.
Without profound scientific research (preferably also using double-blind randomised studies and a very broad range of psychological fields)
I would not put the highest level organ in this galaxy (at least our part we can see) on the plate for anything.
If you change the way reality works for your brain, your brain will change your reality - and maybe you wouldn't even notice.
I don't like 'never change a running system' of course - change it how you want. But don't use stuff you don't really know what the long term consequences are.

I've done some reading about polyphasic sleep, and uberman isn't the only way to do it.
There's biphasic, triphasic, segmented, dual core, ... And many varietions on them.

i've been learning a lot at http://www.polyphasicsociety.com, the guys running that site really know what they're doing and can help with sleep adjustments and diet adjustments. They've sparked my interest in doing a paleo keto diet and giving segmented sleep a shot.

Segmented sleep is where you sleep at night, you go to sleep at sunset and sleep for 3-4,5h. You then wake up and stay awake for at least two hours, then you go asleep again for 1.5-3h. It's pretty flexible, and if you can already function with less sleep, the cores will be smaller too. A small siesta during the day can help you sleep even less at night.

Huh never heard of this... I am actually blessed by not having to sleep much (I had this even as a baby). I sleep just 1 time per 24 hours and sleep about 5 hours 30 mins. Anything more and I feel more tired and worse, and less than 5 hours is usually too short (although I am not too sure how much stretch there is on that side... but definitely not more than 5,5 hours).

I wonder what I could do with 1 power nap, or some of the other options?

All in all: take good care of yourself Josh... I think it's a bit scary if you overdo it... I once halucinated from lack of sleep and yeah... you definitely aren't as sharp quite some time before that.