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Productive on six hours of sleep? You’re deluding yourself, expert says

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251–260 of 309 posts

Re: Productive on six hours of sleep? You’re deluding yourself, expert says

#251
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The commute and school dropoffs are the real lifestyle killer I think. Imagine having an extra 5-15h a week to hang out and do things. Imagine having that much more sleep (if you happen to be burning the midnight oil a lot). I used to remember my parents letting me walk to the school bus stop (near our apartment) and then walking to work or taking the bus themselves. Nowadays we pack the kids into the car drop them o…

> Imagine having an extra 5-15h a week to hang out and do things. I guess it's mostly car owners that waste their time commuting. To me, public transportation user, commuting is actually the time I spend on things like personal mail, HN, little googling and whatnot, so I cannot say it's a total waste of my X hours per week. Sure you're still limited in what you can do, and it's a different story in the US where car i…

I used to live in some area where public transportation required me 2x50min to go to work whereas it was about 2x15-25min by car. Bought a bike and turned that 2x60min but went down to 2x30min in the long run, when conditions are good (no night, no rain)

Re: Productive on six hours of sleep? You’re deluding yourself, expert says

#252

I'm much more interested in why a body needs an amount of sleep, what processes it is conducting, and how you can affect those processes. What happens in the 7th hour that didn't happen in the 6th? If it's a fourth REM cycle, why do we need 4? What does the fourth do that the third didn't? Why do REM cycles take that long? Can you make them take more or less time? Can you determine lack of sleep from a brain scan? Ca…

Pure speculation, but suppose that sleep were a cleaning process such that d(Neuron Waste Removed)/dT was a logistic curve.

Re: Productive on six hours of sleep? You’re deluding yourself, expert says

#253
post #17

This is one of the reasons I hate the eight-hour work day. Between that and all of the other shit you have to do in a day (commute, chores, eating, exercise etc.), it seems like there's little to no opportunity to just have a life. I know it sounds like first world problems (people used to work 100 hour weeks), but I think our culture needs to change before we can really put the onus on people to improve their sleepi…

for me personally the bigger issue is the actual 9-5ish work hours. I'm way more productive later in the day, so if the schedule would allow something like a Noon-4 pm/break/8 pm -midnight type breakdown I'm all for that. this is sometimes possible with telecommuting arrangements, whenever I'm able to do that I'm more productive, more rested and feel like my personal work/life balance is better.

I more of a 6-3 kind of person. But that just strengthens the argument that one size does not fit all.

Re: Productive on six hours of sleep? You’re deluding yourself, expert says

#254
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm with you all the way! I hear people talk about optimizing one's day to be more productive and "get more done in your day" so often...but honestly, between work, family responsibilities, working out a little in the gym, getting involved in side projects (either "working on the car", or working on side dev project), maybe some civic community involvement, social visits (the occasional beer with a buddy), etc...it j…

I also used to feel this way. What worked for me is to not to do some of these things. For example, I got a robot vacuum cleaner and a robot mop. For any additional cleaning, I have a cleaning lady that comes every once in a while. This saves me a couple of hours of cleaning each month. If the car breaks, or something needs to be done around the house, I hire someone to do it. Groceries are delivered according to a s…

> Labour cost are so low here, and salaries in IT are so high

Where’s this magical place?

Re: Productive on six hours of sleep? You’re deluding yourself, expert says

#255
Fuck sleep. I'm waiting for the day when I can click a button on my phone to go to sleep instantly and wake up instantly on a timer. No natural feeling of sleepiness. I hate the time lost to sleep. What does it matter if I lose 5 years in my old age? I gain so much time in my younger years. It's like smoking. It's harmful and will kill you in the long term. But why do you care about living to a 100? You will have n other problems.

Re: Productive on six hours of sleep? You’re deluding yourself, expert says

#256
post #17

This is one of the reasons I hate the eight-hour work day. Between that and all of the other shit you have to do in a day (commute, chores, eating, exercise etc.), it seems like there's little to no opportunity to just have a life. I know it sounds like first world problems (people used to work 100 hour weeks), but I think our culture needs to change before we can really put the onus on people to improve their sleepi…

> (commute, chores, eating, exercise etc.)

I agree with you completely, but you didn't even mention kids. The other stuff, chores, eating, exercise, and so on, can be moved around in time, but kids require constant attention in the moment even when they are a few years old. I'm lucky to get an hour in the evening for me time efter the kids go to sleep, not even enough to watch a full movie if I want 8 hours of sleep. This is every day of the week, since they don't sleep in on weekends but wake up even earlier.

If I don't get to to stuff I enjoy every day I'm miserable, so I usually play video games past bed time and pay for it by walking around in a fog at work. A day with doing something fun feels like a wasted day, like a day closer to the grave with nothing to show for it.

It's not healthy living like this, but the only way I see doing anything different is by skipping doing anything just for fun. I look forward to when the kids are teenagers and I can relax again. /s

Re: Productive on six hours of sleep? You’re deluding yourself, expert says

#257
post #2

By use of meditation and yoga I've found the opposite to be true. The system I've used is described somewhat here http://isha.sadhguru.org/blog/lifestyle/health-fitness/10-he... Edit: downvotes why?

I didn’t downvote you but claiming meditation and yoga substitutes for sleep pattern matches to quack/idiot. Your link has the word guru in it which points the same way. Personally I find it credible because I’ve read studies before suggesting meditation can substitute for sleep 1 for 1 up to some threshold but I’m too lazy to search for them. If you make claims that are as credible as a homeopath or anti-vaxxer cite something that at least looks credible.

Re: Productive on six hours of sleep? You’re deluding yourself, expert says

#258
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The commute and school dropoffs are the real lifestyle killer I think. Imagine having an extra 5-15h a week to hang out and do things. Imagine having that much more sleep (if you happen to be burning the midnight oil a lot). I used to remember my parents letting me walk to the school bus stop (near our apartment) and then walking to work or taking the bus themselves. Nowadays we pack the kids into the car drop them o…

> Imagine having an extra 5-15h a week to hang out and do things. I guess it's mostly car owners that waste their time commuting. To me, public transportation user, commuting is actually the time I spend on things like personal mail, HN, little googling and whatnot, so I cannot say it's a total waste of my X hours per week. Sure you're still limited in what you can do, and it's a different story in the US where car i…

Nope. 10 mins drive to train here, so with margin of safety that's 20 mins. 50 minute train ride. 10 minute walk at the other end.

So 13+ hours each week.

As to being able to do stuff on the train - Maybe on some of the longer haul units coming from further afield where you get a table, power point, and elbow room, but on the commuter trains there's not enough room to work. There's a reason few people try to work on the L or London underground.

Best I can do is scan a few websites on my phone for 40 mins, and catch up (read only) on email.

Re: Productive on six hours of sleep? You’re deluding yourself, expert says

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your definition of "works" is suspicious to me. If you're saying that in the short term, short-term thinking works, sure. If you're in college and are doing a bunch of work that doesn't matter to deadlines that are entirely made up, sure, you can get away with it. You claim that doctors do fine without enough sleep, but even doctors don't claim that any more. Doctor friends tell me it's a big focus for reform. [1] An…

I don't mean to claim doctors do fine without enough sleep. Doctor friends I have spoken to talk about this talk about the reforms but it is not uniformly positive. I am trying to posit that the claim that we function better with more sleep is true. But that claim is made in a vacuum. Person A operates at 100% well rested. But operating at 80% or 60% is more valuable than 0% if averaged out over time. So I can write…

> I'd argue I'd rather a doctor save my life that day, than do a great job and make sure I never scar over two days when the option isn't there.

> What knowledge are we gaining by these discussions?

Sure, if that was all there was to it, then you'd be 100% right. The knowledge we seem to be gaining from these discussions is that a programmer who works 6 hours a day is overall more productive than one who works 8 hours a day, let alone one who has been on a 16 hour death march for 6 months. The same idea applied to the doctor example may mean that your doctor is less likely to save your life if they're on the 28th hour of their shift than one that wasn't.

Yes, there's a time and a place for burning a candle at both ends, but we seem to think that this is OK to do in the long term. So sure, if you need to pull a rare 20-hour marathon to fix an urgent problem, do it - the value might well justify the cost. But don't tell yourself that it's sustainable or even optimal in the long term, evidence seems to suggest the exact opposite.

Re: Productive on six hours of sleep? You’re deluding yourself, expert says

#260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question: Why do people do this with the school pickup/dropoff? What is the point of that? Do schools still have buses?

Two working parents means preschool until kindergarten, and preschool doesn't offer busses. If your district offers wraparound care for school-aged children, it's probably not served by busses. You can't have kids home alone any more because somebody might inform on you.

Inform? Wow... with our muni they would just assume some other adult was caring for the child at hime, unless they had reason to suspect abuse for some other reason, of course.
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