
How to Massively Increase Your Productivity and Happiness in 2 Hours Per Day - staunch
Go to sleep 2 hours earlier than you normally do!<p>It's easy to fall into the sleep deprivation trap and think you're getting more out of yourself, even when you're really not. I've always found the need to sleep at all very frustrating, so this lesson is hard-learned for me.<p>I'm still in love with my 36 hour hackathons, but now most days I'm trying to get enough sleep to feel energetic all day without in assistance from drugs like caffeine and nicotine.

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pg
Even during Viaweb I still slept 8 hours a night (roughly 3-11). The most
productive people rarely have more than 6 hours or so of really concentrated
work per day, except in emergencies. If you can ensure you get that every day,
you don't need to economize on sleep.

My way of getting those 6 solid hours was a common hacker solution to the
problem: I used the hours between 9 pm and 3 am, when no one could interrupt
me.

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sherman
Why is it that people are most productive (at hacking) during night time
hours? Even with no interruptions during the day, I find myself not as engaged
as I would be during the night.

Also, I've read that taking short naps for about 20 minutes (any longer would
make you groggy) helps improve learning potential and confidence.

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nostrademons
I tend to be most productive in the morning - usually around 9:00 AM - 1:00
PM. Then I typically have another productive period before dinner (it'd be
5:00 - 7:00 PM if I didn't have to commute from work), and then one before I
get to bed (11:00 PM - 1:00 AM or so, 'cept if I don't have obligations like
getting up the next morning it runs till like 3:00 AM, which pushes the next
day further by 2 hours). So I guess it varies among people.

It occurs to me that with 6 hours of productive hacking, you could _in theory_
start a startup and still have a day job, _except_ for the interruptions. For
example, all three of my most productive periods are bisected by an hour-long
commute or the need to go to bed, making them effectively useless. Has anyone
tried telecommuting + startup, or consulting + startup? It seems like if I
could shift my working hours to 2:00 - 10:00 PM and get rid of commuting time,
I'd be able to get all the work for my day job done in the 5:00-7:00 PM
timeslot, and have 6 hours of useful time for my own projects.

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sherman
Wow, you can finish all your work for your day job in 2 hours? Impressive.

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nostrademons
Most day jobs don't have much real work. ;-)

Actually, I should probably clarify - when doing active product development,
it takes way more than 2 hrs/day of work. At that point, you can basically
forget about doing any outside programming projects. But most jobs are very
feast-or-famine: once you've written the program, you have little bug reports
dribble in, or your boss asks you to reboot the server or something. If you
architected the program well, it shouldn't take more than 2 hrs/day to keep up
with those.

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dpapathanasiou
I thought you were going to say: "Put news.ycombinator.com in your firewall's
blacklist" ;)

But I agree with your going-to-bed-early idea.

And I'll add: spend the first 30 to 45 minutes after you get up doing some
kind of cardio exercise (running, treadmill, cycling).

You'll be much more relaxed and have a ton of energy all morning.

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nreece
As the saying goes, sleep over your problems and you'll have a solution in the
morning.

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palish
I always worry about what ideas I may be missing out on, though.

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hello_moto
You know your ideas are worthless without the right execution right?

Plus if it's not meant to be for you to have a great idea, it won't come
anyway.

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rokhayakebe
Force yourself to sleep and it is most likely not going to happen. What I
found helpful is to ACCEPT that you cannot sleep, but you can RELAX. Get your
MIND OFF RUBY and think about that HOT WAITRESS you have been dying to ask out
on a date. Imagine being on a date with her and start SMILING, I promess you
will go to sleep within 15-30 minutes.

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abstractbill
Couldn't agree more. I've done all-nighters, but when I'm refreshed I get more
done in a couple of hours than I do in a whole day when I'm tired.

Unfortunately I sometimes get bouts of insomnia... anyone have good tips on
how to cure that?

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rms
Try some melatonin. You can buy it at any drug store with the vitamins. It
comes in 1mg or 3mg size, most doctors only recommend the 1mg size but there's
nothing wrong with the 3mg size if you don't make a habit of it.

Even if you do make a habit of it, some anecdotal evidence shows it is good
for you.

It also has a side effect of giving you extremely vivid or even lucid dreams.

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natrius
They don't recommend the 3mg size because it offers no benefit over the 1mg,
and it could possibly be bad for you. There's no point. If you get the 3mg
size, get a pill cutter and cut them in half.

Making a habit out of it sounds like a bad idea, because there hasn't been
much research done into its long term safety.

~~~
rms
If the 1mg doesn't cure your insomnia, then the larger dose might work. It's
also more likely to induce dreams. Wikipedia mentions a study of individuals
given 50mg of Melatonin that experienced measurably enhanced REM sleep time.

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randallsquared
News reports a few years ago said that studies had shown that 3mg worked less
well than none at all.

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jsjenkins168
The longer the brain goes without sleep, the more sleep debt is incurred. So
staying awake for long periods at a time is unproductive from a time
perspective. I'd advocate the opposite: take naps.

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pbnaidu
I agree with you. I read in National Geography Magazine that sleep is like
managing an account. Sleep will catch up to you and you end up wasting more
time by sleeping at odd hours to make up for the sleep debt created by not
sleeping enough.

Recently, I read this article that says humans just need 2hrs of sleep, sounds
interesting, here's the link to it
[http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,774680,00.h...](http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,774680,00.html)

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kirse
I fully agree, I've found that everything pretty much comes back to sleep,
whether it's managing stress, work, or just plain getting sick. If there's any
other athletes here, one of the key things you know is that you don't get
stronger during the workout, you get stronger when you're recovering.

Can't say I've ever pulled an all-nighter hackathon, though. My productivity
drops off the cliff after 16+ hours of working.

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drusenko
It definitely works that way with some people. OTOH, I can sometimes (not
always) be very productive well into a 30+ hour session. I've found it's most
useful to turn off the alarm clock, though, and sleep as long as you need to.

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ivankirigin
I see late night hacking as a tale of diminishing returns. For an extra hour
of wake, how much less productive will I be tomorrow? How much earlier could I
get up if I go to sleep earlier, and how does that time's productivity compare
to now?

This translates to: if I'm tired I go to sleep. Unless I have a deadline for
the next day.

~~~
ivankirigin
Luckily I seem good on <7 hours of sleep. Exercise helps.

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ashwin
22nd hour in progress...6 pots coffee, two packs of cigarettes, some java
monster --> productivity peaked 5 hours back but shitty part is that I have to
go for a 8 hour workday in 5 hours! and it has nothing to do with the
hackathon..

Miles to go.......

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acgourley
Anyone else ever go to sleep while thinking about the problem you were hacking
on, and end up having horrible dreams while you (ineptly) try to solve it in
your sleep? I get really bad sleep that way and wake up stressed out.

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mhartl
I've had similar experiences to nostrademons. I often crack hard problems in
the groggy netherworld just as I'm going to sleep or just as I'm waking up (or
during an afternoon nap). Showers and long walks are also good for this
purpose.

I mainly dream about software these days, but I had similar experiences in
college and grad school with physics. Freshman year I figured out the orbit in
an inverse quartic potential during a nap (warning: you pass through the---
bang!---center of force), and in grad school I unlocked the last remaining
problem in my Ph.D. thesis during a one-hour random walk around campus.

Incidentally, all this contributes to my conclusion that I'm not well-suited
to a normal job. Even if I could get an employer to accept intellectually that
they should pay me to take naps and go for long walks, I don't think they
could ever really come to terms with it emotionally. Whereas the cofounder of
my last startup probably never even noticed I occasionally napped and that I
spent half my time walking around town; if he did, he certainly didn't care.

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byrneseyeview
Has anyone run a successful company on a polyphasic sleep schedule?

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nostrademons
Steve Pavlina, maybe? Though his company may only be successful to the extent
that people believe they will become successful by sleeping polyphasically...

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byrneseyeview
He ran his business on a normal schedule; he stopped the polyphasic experiment
after a few months.

Buckminster Fuller might count (
[http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,774680,00.h...](http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,774680,00.html)
), but his friends made him give it up.

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sabat
We're so quick to deprive ourselves of sleep, but that is the one thing we
need the most -- more than food, I think. Without sleep, you become depressed,
your mind slows, your vocabulary shrinks. You lose IQ points.

I'm the father of a toddler. Needless to say, the last couple of years, I
haven't slept well. Finally I gave up and started going to bed a couple of
hours early. Amazing, the difference.

