How much does sleep affect your productivity?
16 December 2006I don’t know the answer to this question myself. But, I wonder if there is any type of immediate correlation between sleep and productivity throughout the course of a full day.
What’s piqued my interest in this topic is some information I’ve read on the web about biphasic and polyphasic sleep. Both of these are drastic departures from the typical sleeping and waking cycles and I am not honestly game for either. It seems everyone has their own opinion on what proper sleeping is.
I have a good friend who swears by his six hours of sleep a night. His wife on the other hand, asserts that nine hours of sleep a night is an absolute necessity. Personally, I’ve found that when I begin letting my sleep slip in favor of work or play for more than a day or two, I find it difficult to concentrate or just to motivate myself.
So, to answer this question I’ve decided to start logging my sleep time on a semi-daily basis along with the percentage of my daily task that get done. I want to do this often so I can see if it is a trend of sleep deprivation that hits the productivity or if one night of lost sleep will have an immediate impact.
In order to keep this as fair as possible I will work and play as normal and just attempt to observe the data for the first month or two. I know that this is far from a well designed experiment as I am not taking into account such things as exercise, stimulants (like coffee or tea) or, other things one may use to keep their motor running through the day. But, I will try my best to keep it honest and keep up my moderate exercise and supplements.
If after that time I see a trend or pattern evolve I will consider adjusting my schedule. Once I have enough data points I’ll start posting some charts here.
on December 16th, 2006 at 2:40 am
I too need at least 8-9 hours sleep per day, otherwise I can’t concentrate on the job and motivate myself to keep doing what I need to do.
A few days with less then 8 hours of sleep usually means that my week is ruined, I typically don’t have the time to sleep a little extra to compensate for the days that I slept less. It’s only during the weekends that I can sleep a little extra.
I don’t think that those sleeping tricks will work very well.