Pretty much always between 7 to 8 hours, if less then it becomes super difficult on second part of the, if too long then strangely it's harder in the first part of the day. Might be related to sleep cycles from which i wake up.
Used to sleep for 8 hours, now its down to 7. Less sleep definitely affects productivity, but i can stretch couple of days with very less sleep (<5 hours), after that I hit a block and see a drastic decrease in productivity if I don't get a good night sleep.
Are you are feeling low productivity, and blaming lack of sleep? There is a chance it could be something else as well.. pls seek help if needed.
6 to 7 hours during the week, on weekends mostly 7..8, rarely up to 10 hours. In my teens and twenties I had a hard time getting up early, but this gets better with age ;)
PS: productivity is only affected if I only get 3..4 hrs sleep for 2 or 3 days. I'm basically useless then. The more important decision was to get up early and not working late, this reduced 'latent burnout' symptoms dramatically.
Productivity is a bit complex to relate in a direct way (I can be "productive" also with less sleep), but I know for sure that this is the amount I need to be 100% of my potential.
Interestingly, I estimate that doing sports (which I do heavily) accounts for 30 to 60 minutes of my sleep - in other words, if I didn't do sports, I could sleep such amount less and be equally "productive", although obviously, my body would slowly decay.
Many activity trackers will provide stats about how much you sleep, and how you compare with the rest of the population. I appreciate your question is about HN readers rather than fitness nerds, but there might be an overlap.
Not sleep in the general sense, but sleeping late into the morning. Years of having to be in formation at 0600 every morning have trained me to rise before dawn :(
On the upside, some of my most productive coding time is during the quiet morning hours before the wife and kids get up.
8 hours when I have time. 7 to 4 in a crunch. I try to control the sleep debt and pay it off ASAP, or next weekends.
Lack of sleep has a noticeable effect on productivity (especially error rate). When I was younger I did not notice it so vividly, which I ascribe strictly to improved introspection.
One of the best vacations in my life, after a particularly hard project, involved having 12-16 hours of sleep every day, for two weeks, without any drugs; just a calm winter forest away from civilization. It did wonders to my productivity and cognitive ability. In 6 months past it I quickly learned a huge bunch of apparently hard things that propelled me for years after that.
My biggest problem with sleep is the fixed working schedule I have to follow. The 9-to-5 is killing me. It's not that there isn't enough time to sleep, it's that I cannot convince my body to go to sleep if it doesn't feel like it. Just last night I stood awake till 5 a.m. unable to fall asleep despite all efforts. The problem is that my natural clock seems to be working on a 26-7 hours per day cycle and I cannot fit this properly into the regular working hours. This leads to general accumulation of tiredness during the week and on Friday I need a total reset by going to bed early. At least now I know what to look for in future job opportunities.
Have you considered a polyphasic sleep schedule? If you truly do have a non-standard circadian rhythm, you should be able to adapt one of the dual core schedules towards it.
Maybe? I was thinking more that stuff comes up that affects my schedule, and I don't be forced into living with the constraints of a 10 p.m. bedtime (or whatever time I set). More to the point, I am more disciplined about getting to bed before 12 a.m. I do not want to go bed at a fixed time.
Agreed, 5 years ago I would have made the same post. I just did the "wake up" time for 4-6 months, which had a lot of bad days, but eventually it clicked in that I wake up then, so I get tired at 12.
I've personally tried this, and it only sometimes works. It depends on the wakeup time. I can go as early as 9am and feel rested. This is a few hours before my natural waking time - and wake up. 8am? That's a bit of a struggle, but overall doable. Any earlier than that and I get a sleep debt. The quality of sleep simply isn't good enough to keep me going and it winds up bad for my mental health.
To be fair, I've been like this since I was a child. Everyone thought I'd grow out of it, but I'm 39. I work evenings and nights with some ease, though, and luckily have generally had jobs that start later in the day or allow days I can sleep later (even if I had a few early days during the week).
Personally when I take melatonin, I fall asleep quickly but I get weird dreams and I feel my sleep quality isn't the same. I took it for a little while (a couple of months) and now only take it when I'm really struggling to fall asleep.
I've tried it a couple times. I have to allow extra time to sleep and have someone there to wake me up since I sleep even heavier than normal - more chance to miss the alarm, unfortunately. I wake up groggy, but once that passes I'm very, very well-rested. Also, I get weird dreams as well.
I decided long ago I wouldn't try it again without a doctor's advice, which is probably a good thing since now I live in Norway and it is only available with prescription. Some folks do wind up needing it if they take it every night, though. I worked in a pharmacy in the states and heard the pharmacists' advice on this very thing many times.
My understanding from speaking with sleep specialists is that you'd need to take a large amount every day for weeks or months to develop a tolerance. They thus recommend cycling off melatonin bi-weekly or monthly for a little while.
(Sorry, no source other than time spent visiting the Cornell Sleep Institute.)
I highly recommend you try meditation, not just because it reduces the total amount of sleep you need ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2919439/ ), but also because it sounds likes it'll teach you how to drift asleep more easily.
Yoga is also another great option, but just know that both of these will require a small amount of dedication.
That's really interesting! Now all we need to do is find a MED where we save more time sleeping than we need to invest meditating. Although that might be offset by the amount of focus we gain by meditating as it would allow us to be more efficient.
These days my biggest problem is waking up too early, not too late.
What worked for me:
1. eliminating caffeine from my diet, saving it for medicinal purposes. Ibuprofen + caffeine is an order of magnitude more effective for me than ibuprofen by itself; but that's because I'm no longer caffeine tolerant. (See #4)
2. No screens after 8PM.
3. Better reasons for going to bed and waking up early. AKA a wife to share the bed and kids to get to school.
4. Getting older. Biologically, 7 year olds & 50 year olds share a propensity for waking up early, with teenagers the highest propensity for sleeping in. You don't have to wait until you're 50, it gets better in your thirties, in my experience.
I've tried most of the advices mentioned except (serious) meditation and melatonin. Exercise has the opposite effect for me - it pumps me up and makes falling asleep even more difficult, and since I exercise 3-4 days per week after work, this is the main driver that keeps me awake. I also wake up every day at the same time. The problem is not the waking up part but the general feeling of exhaustion that accumulates during the day and the week because when I feel like falling asleep (between 1 and 4 pm) I am at my busiest at work, so I just push through and by the time I am at home and ready to relax, my body has given up on the idea of sleep.
Have you tried exercising before work? I've been doing 1hr to 1.5 hr runs before work once a week and I'm always relatively sleepy by the time the sun goes down those days, as long as I haven't had caffeine after 2ish pm.
5 hours on a bad night. 7 on a good night. Not including the 50 or so minutes awake in the middle of the night.
I'm extremely unproductive on the days I get 5 hours, and can work around 4 hours/day when I get 7. I'd probably be extremely productive if I can get 9 hours of sleep.
I'm pretty useless if I get less than 5 hours of sleep. Anymore than that and I'm good to go. I shoot for about 9ish hours of sleep a night, I typically have a sleepless night every 10 days where I'm up at 330 until the next sleep.
While running Camarades/ww.com I got by with 3 to 5 hours of sleep per night, usually because I could not fall asleep and then finally I'd fall asleep near daybreak and then sleep until 11 am. This was pretty terrible, combined with flying back and forth between Canada and the Netherlands it really drained me. It's not that I spent less time in bed, I just could not sleep until I was physically overwhelmed.
I'm in better physical shape now than back then, cycle more, eat better and no longer have the crazy travel schedule and I'm sleeping much better now, usually 6 to 7 hours but it still isn't 'normal' in that I often am awake in the middle of the night and sleep during the day, especially when work is more demanding.
Productivity has never really been an issue, no matter what the sleep regime was.
I feel well and I can focus if I sleep for 8:00-8:30 hours. If I sleep less than 7:00-7:30 hours per day I feel unwell and I cannot concentrate. In between 7:30-8:00 hours I can somewhat concentrate but not for too long.
Sleeping longer over weekends does not work for me, since I still wake up at (usually) about the same time every day. So I still sleep about the same time every day.
Between 7-8 hours usually. My son tends to get up at 5:30am, so the rest of the household does too. It was 4:30am this morning, though. Teething pain :(
That pretty much means my wife and I went from about a midnight bedtime to 9pm, which makes us feel really old & boring but it's the only way to make sure we have enough sleep to have a happy, productive day.
If I don't get enough sleep, my Tourette Syndrome gets worse. I also tend to get depressed & a little grouchy. It affects my decision making, and I have too many people depending on me to let that happen.
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[ 27.4 ms ] story [ 154 ms ] threadAre you are feeling low productivity, and blaming lack of sleep? There is a chance it could be something else as well.. pls seek help if needed.
PS: productivity is only affected if I only get 3..4 hrs sleep for 2 or 3 days. I'm basically useless then. The more important decision was to get up early and not working late, this reduced 'latent burnout' symptoms dramatically.
Productivity is a bit complex to relate in a direct way (I can be "productive" also with less sleep), but I know for sure that this is the amount I need to be 100% of my potential.
Interestingly, I estimate that doing sports (which I do heavily) accounts for 30 to 60 minutes of my sleep - in other words, if I didn't do sports, I could sleep such amount less and be equally "productive", although obviously, my body would slowly decay.
I've heard rumors that if anything the exhaustion taught you how to fall asleep at anywhere/anywhere.
On the upside, some of my most productive coding time is during the quiet morning hours before the wife and kids get up.
Lack of sleep has a noticeable effect on productivity (especially error rate). When I was younger I did not notice it so vividly, which I ascribe strictly to improved introspection.
One of the best vacations in my life, after a particularly hard project, involved having 12-16 hours of sleep every day, for two weeks, without any drugs; just a calm winter forest away from civilization. It did wonders to my productivity and cognitive ability. In 6 months past it I quickly learned a huge bunch of apparently hard things that propelled me for years after that.
Prolonged (3+ days) sleep at <6 hours eventually leads to me crashing at the weekend.
crash = a good 10 hour sleep
Lately I experimented with a 1h nap after lunch (I'm getting old!), and can report that I feel equally refreshed with only 6h of sleep a night.
So, 7h total now, but split into two 1+6 sessions. It feels great to have 2 extra hours per day!
https://www.polyphasicsociety.com
But you have to think of it as something that you choose, i.e. your own limitation, not some external limitation.
Having a normal circadian rhythm makes the rest of life a lot more enjoyable (fun) than not. Especially after 30.
To be fair, I've been like this since I was a child. Everyone thought I'd grow out of it, but I'm 39. I work evenings and nights with some ease, though, and luckily have generally had jobs that start later in the day or allow days I can sleep later (even if I had a few early days during the week).
It might not be for everyone, but it's changed the way I feel about sleeping. And it's non-habituating
I decided long ago I wouldn't try it again without a doctor's advice, which is probably a good thing since now I live in Norway and it is only available with prescription. Some folks do wind up needing it if they take it every night, though. I worked in a pharmacy in the states and heard the pharmacists' advice on this very thing many times.
(Sorry, no source other than time spent visiting the Cornell Sleep Institute.)
Yoga is also another great option, but just know that both of these will require a small amount of dedication.
https://xkcd.com/320/
These days my biggest problem is waking up too early, not too late.
What worked for me:
1. eliminating caffeine from my diet, saving it for medicinal purposes. Ibuprofen + caffeine is an order of magnitude more effective for me than ibuprofen by itself; but that's because I'm no longer caffeine tolerant. (See #4)
2. No screens after 8PM.
3. Better reasons for going to bed and waking up early. AKA a wife to share the bed and kids to get to school.
4. Getting older. Biologically, 7 year olds & 50 year olds share a propensity for waking up early, with teenagers the highest propensity for sleeping in. You don't have to wait until you're 50, it gets better in your thirties, in my experience.
I'm extremely unproductive on the days I get 5 hours, and can work around 4 hours/day when I get 7. I'd probably be extremely productive if I can get 9 hours of sleep.
Productivity for me depends more on other factors like: relationship status, familymembers wellbeing, drinks & feeling in or out of control.
I'm in better physical shape now than back then, cycle more, eat better and no longer have the crazy travel schedule and I'm sleeping much better now, usually 6 to 7 hours but it still isn't 'normal' in that I often am awake in the middle of the night and sleep during the day, especially when work is more demanding.
Productivity has never really been an issue, no matter what the sleep regime was.
The data is as follows:
I feel well and I can focus if I sleep for 8:00-8:30 hours. If I sleep less than 7:00-7:30 hours per day I feel unwell and I cannot concentrate. In between 7:30-8:00 hours I can somewhat concentrate but not for too long.
Sleeping longer over weekends does not work for me, since I still wake up at (usually) about the same time every day. So I still sleep about the same time every day.
That pretty much means my wife and I went from about a midnight bedtime to 9pm, which makes us feel really old & boring but it's the only way to make sure we have enough sleep to have a happy, productive day.
If I don't get enough sleep, my Tourette Syndrome gets worse. I also tend to get depressed & a little grouchy. It affects my decision making, and I have too many people depending on me to let that happen.