Thomas Edison and the Cult of Sleep Deprivation

One thing that having a kid taught me is that sleep deprivation really hurts my productivity as a programmer. It may be that some people can sleep 5 hours and function just fine, I&#x27;m not going to say everybody needs the same amount of sleep. But when it comes to work ridiculous hours I&#x27;ve yet to see someone regularly claiming 100 hours work weeks outperform me over any length of time.<p>If I can get in the zone and achieve peak productivity for 8 hours that is an extremely successful day. If I do that and then get 16 hours of exercise, healthy eating, and sleep then the next day I&#x27;ll have made more progress in my unconscious and hit a positive feedback loop where elegant solutions to difficult problems present themselves effortlessly.<p>Contrast to my youth where I&#x27;d regularly &quot;work&quot; 12-16 hour days. Then I had the mentality that 5pm is a half-day, so if progress wasn&#x27;t great by then I still had another 7 hours! This can lead to a negative feedback loop where you spend more hours trying to compensate for poor performance earlier.<p>I&#x27;m not claiming this as a universal truth, some people probably have greater capacity than me, but I know how easy it is to fool oneself.

&quot;Sleep Drives Metabolite Clearance from the Adult Brain<p>The conservation of sleep across all animal species suggests that sleep serves a vital function. We here report that sleep has a critical function in ensuring metabolic homeostasis ... the restorative function of sleep may be a consequence of the enhanced removal of potentially neurotoxic waste products that accumulate in the awake central nervous system.&quot;<p><a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6156/373" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sciencemag.org&#x2F;content&#x2F;342&#x2F;6156&#x2F;373</a><p>TL;DR: sleep is necessary, otherwise it probably wouldn&#x27;t have evolved in so many different species. If you&#x27;re really lucky (and a dolphin), you can get by with only sleeping one hemisphere of your brain at a time: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unihemispheric_slow-wave_sleep" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Unihemispheric_slow-wave_sleep</a>

I once worked with a guy who only ever slept about 4 hours a night for years. He would then run a full marathon into work every morning. I can tell you right now, his body was there but his ability to do anything other than make small tactical decisions was destroyed. Having a strategic meeting about the direction of the company was pointless, as you could nearly see has brain unable to compute and think at that level. The end of the story was that he died on Mount Everest and the company has basically collapsed because of his poor management and some other financial irregularities.

&gt; Over time, children’s books and magazines began to promote this type of Edisonian asceticism.<p>I remember reading a children&#x27;s book on goblins. The theme was that these goblins worked late nights and helped humans with their chores while the humans snored and slept.<p>The book was actually a prize given to me in grade one for something that I did well in pre-school. Since it was a prize, the book was especially dear to me and I would read it over and over.<p>Now that I think about it, I have always been a &quot;sleep deprived&quot; person since childhood. I wonder how much of my life was shaped by that single book!

Saw this in a twitter update.<p>Losing sleep to hit a deadline the next day is valid, but it isn&#x27;t a productivity enhancer. I have always needed a full 8hrs for good work. -- John Carmack

Was that really the end of the article? I feel like it was about a quarter done...

I have relatively poor attention span, and have trouble maintaining good sleep patterns. What I&#x27;ve found is that there is a sort of &quot;Ballmer Peak&quot; ( <a href="http://xkcd.com/323/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;323&#x2F;</a> ) when I&#x27;m slightly under-slept where I can focus far better than when I&#x27;m fully rested. Of course it is a narrow zone and not really sustainable.<p>I wonder if that is the general experience in our attention deficient generation, and if that might be a contributing factor in people preferring to cut their sleep.

The cult of sleep deprivation is definitely the norm in the startup world. People seem to be proud to not sleep much. Makes me question how sustainable it is

Over the years I&#x27;ve found that I definitely need 8 hours sleep but didn&#x27;t often get it. I would normally manage about 6-7 hours and would soon build up a deficit. This had a definite impact on my well being and performance at work. Recently I&#x27;ve started using a timer instead of an alarm clock to ensure that I always get eight hours. If I go to bed later I get up later. On the rare occasions that I go to bed substantially later (e.g. attending a concert) and so can&#x27;t allow eight hours, I still cope well because I&#x27;m already well rested. Ditto for when my young son wakes in the night - previously this would have killed me.<p>I know this isn&#x27;t viable for everyone but my employer allows flexible working hours.

I have found to stay maximally productive and creative I have to switch it up.<p>If I just get in a routine it seems like things flag. The best thing for me is to laze off and sleep for 10 hours a day... casually poke around at some stuff for awhile. Then, have a burst of output and sleep 5 hours for a couple&#x2F;few nights while spending the remainder in a flurry of concentrated activity. Then, back to a regular normal routine for a stretch. If I try any one of these for long it seems my productivity and interest flag though.<p>I don&#x27;t know if it&#x27;s just me or if we evolved to have periods of rest and stress.

There&#x27;s an easy counter example: weightlifting. By taking Edison&#x27;s example as a maxim he&#x27;d have all people interested in weightlifting spend day and night at the gym and hardly resting. I suppose he&#x27;d recommend you take 2-3 minute catnaps between sets to recover.

Measure yourself.<p>If you believe you can work equally good with sleep deprivation you should test it.<p>Start measuring how productive you are hour after hour, WRITING down(very important) not only how much you do but also your energy level. Do this for 40 days.<p>Now, for 40 days do the same but sleeping what you need, no timer clock.<p>Compare the results.<p>When I did it for a completely unrelated reason, the results were so shocking to me. I actually believed that sacrifice meant better results. It does not have to.<p>Probably you don&#x27;t need to sleep much if your job does not require much from you, just meeting people, staying there and so on.<p>I do triple or quadruple my productivity. I do program machines, and those things make work for me, but what they do has to be perfect.<p>Remember Chernobyl or the Air France disasters. The mostly trained and smart persons become stupid after sleep deprivation.

I worked in small startups for many years, and then later I worked in big companies for a few years. From my own experience, I would say sleep deprivation has no point in a big company. It only makes sense in a small startup when you are trying to hit some very specific and life-altering deadline, such as a meeting with a potential investor, whose money might determine the fate of the company.<p>I recall a long stretch from 2003 to 2006 (myself and my friends were doing our own startup) where we were often working crazy hours to meet deadlines. I recall at one point a guy was going to come in and possibly invest half a million dollars -- that would have changed everything for us. I recall I worked for 20 hours, then I slept for 2 hours, and then I worked for another 20 hours, just so we could have a bug-free demo when the guy showed up. I recall another time when we had to meet with a potential investor at 12 PM on Thursday, and I started work at 11 AM on Wednesday, and I kept working, and I kept finding bugs, and I worked through the night fixing everything, and I worked right up until the meeting. Then the meeting ended at 1 PM -- I had worked 26 straight hours.<p>Sleep deprivation only makes sense in the life of the startup because that part of your life that you spend in a startup is suppose to be finite. Paul Graham covers this in his essay &quot;How to make wealth&quot;:<p>&quot;Economically, you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole working life into a few years. Instead of working at a low intensity for forty years, you work as hard as you possibly can for four. This pays especially well in technology, where you earn a premium for working fast.&quot;<p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;paulgraham.com&#x2F;wealth.html</a><p>Sleep deprivation will always be a part of startup life -- that is natural. You face deadlines that determine whether the company will continue to exist.<p>In a big company, sleep deprivation doesn&#x27;t make sense. I made this mistake when I first moved to big companies, and it took me awhile to unlearn the habits that I had acquired at startups. In a big company, your individual contribution is no longer a large part of of what makes the company go (you can shape the destiny of a company with 4 people, but not one that has 400 people). And in a big company, there are no particular deadlines that truly determine the fate of the company -- nothing that has the same urgency as &quot;We are running out of money so we need tomorrow&#x27;s potential investor to invest&quot;.<p>In a big company, in the future, I will be cautious about working an 80 week. But if I do a startup again, I know what I am signing up for.

16 hour day at 30% output Vs 8 at 70%.<p>I have maybe 6 good hours in any day which I jealously guard for programming, the other 2 is side work (no brain required for a lot of it), emails, financial stuff, general office work.<p>I guard my sleep like an ultramax.

Something that took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out is that I don&#x27;t need 8 hours sleep every night, just on average. The correct sleeping time turns out to be half the time I was previously awake for.

Four billion years of evolution? Professor Russell Foster from Oxford University has no clue, evoluton learned us to sleep polyphasic, like babies, where you need far less sleep than the 8 recommended hours. I&#x27;m sure even Thomas Edison took regular naps.

AdBlock has blocked 17 ads on this page

The argument is made that evolution is based on a light-dark cycle, but is also based on predators who prefer to catch prey asleep. Survival favored those who could awaken and stay awake until a threat has passed or until sustenance was secure. Sleep is often a luxury, and not due to unhealthy life always. And often we are entranced by what we are doing, living our dreams. Sleep is personal and largely subjective, there is no universal truth on it as long as we all have different lives.