Interesting, but the article actually says hardly anything about sleep, and "generalists" here means "organisms with the ability to change in response to their environment". There's not the slightest suggestion that human beings who are more "generalist" need more sleep than ones who are "specialist" in any normal sense.<p>Incidentally, sloths and armadillos sleep for about 20 hours a day. Are they generalists?
The whole "tradeoff" series of this blog in general is really good for decision making.<p>It includes:<p><i>Some now vs More later<p></i>Random vs Determined<p><i>Proximity vs Scale<p></i>Training vs Battling<p><i>Loyalty vs Universality<p></i>Sure Bet vs Shot in the Dark<p><i>Switching Costs vs Change Gains<p></i>Offense vs Defense<p>*Efficiency vs Predicatability
I definitely fall into the generalist category. Just in working on my startup I have to write code in two different languages, write markup, do design (completely different from the code), do marketing/networking type stuff (further different from either the design or the coding) and enter recipes (which means reading and parsing them - further different).<p>When not working on the startup I get bored if I don't get enough variety from my activities. If I'm doing too much liberal arts type work - such as when I teach, then I crave code. When I was coding all day at my day job, I got home and just wanted to read, cook or garden.<p>I typically need 9 to 10 hours of sleep a night. I'll take more if I can get it. I can operate on 7 with lots of caffeine. Much less than that and I'm non-functional.<p>My girlfriend, who only needs 6 hours of sleep a night (sometimes less), often gives me crap for being such a log. Especially when she wakes up a solid 2 hours before I do and spends the morning bored. But now I can give her a reason: I'm a generalist!
While specialists count sheep to get sleep generalist try to build a framework for selling those sheep, so they have a lot more work to do while sleeping.