Archive for the ‘productivity’ Category

My Polyphasic Sleep Experiment

Thursday, July 29th, 2010

I've always been one to try new things, and screwing with my sleep patterns to attempt to cram more into my day seemed like a fun thing to try :) I had a go at it a few weeks back, and wanted to share my experience.

Polyphasic sleep is something that caught my eye a year ago, when I heard about the idea from Nathaniel Talbott at Bizconf last year. The idea is that you take a much shorter night’s sleep (perhaps 3-5 hours) and make up for it with 20 minute naps spaced out during the day. There are some fixed schedules that have been shown to work, but the basic rule is that the shorter your nightly (or “core”) sleep, the more naps you need and the more fixed your nap schedule has to be during the day.

The idea of getting loads more time in my day really appealed, so I finally decided to give it a go after I saw Micah Martin was trying it too.

My experience

I went for a 3 hour core sleep from 10:30pm to 1:00am, with 3 naps spaced out during the day: one at 6 - 6:20am, one at 12:10pm - 12:30pm, and one at 5:10pm - 5:30pm. The idea was that I could get my first nap in before my kids awoke at 7am, and then nap once at lunchtime, and once just before I came home.

Full of anticipation of hours of extra time, I went to bed on Sunday night at 10:30pm, setting my alarm for 1am.

Sure enough, the alarm went off and I dragged myself out of bed. I felt euphoric at the thought of having all this time, and my 750 words for the day proudly exclaimed the virtues of this sort of living. (I’m afraid I’m a serial kool-aid drinker. I took my naps at normal times, and it all worked wonderfully. My naps weren’t wonderful: we have a very open office and I couldn’t easily find a good place to sleep for 20 minutes. I felt a little tired, but not too bad to be honest. That is, until 10:30pm where I promptly crashed. The fact that my baby daughter was asleep by then was great (later I found that this was a happy coincidence :). I slept very deeply until 1am the following day.

Tuesday to Friday I felt much more tired, and found that I really needed my naps at the appointed time. It was like my body began to shut down at around midday and I knew I needed to go and sleep. The nights were much worse though. It was a real struggle to keep my eyes open between 1:00am and 6:00am after only three hours core sleep. I managed it though, and only had one short oversleep.

Why I stopped

The real problem, the one that ultimately caused me to abort after a week, was not the tiredness. I think that I could have gone on and persevered throught that. The problem was scheduling the naps, the life adjustment and the flexibility.

Whilst you’re adapting, it’s really important not to deviate from your set nap schedule, yet I have three kids and a busy work schedule. Often this causes me to be out on trips at the weekend, and in London meeting clients midweek. I was looking at my diary a week ahead and thinking: “How on earth am I going to survive Wednesday? And Saturday? Oh, and Sunday?”

If I skipped a nap whilst adjusting, it would effectively had set me back several days in the adaptation process, and with my schedule I couldn’t guarantee that I’d ever finish adapting. Some sleep deprivation is acceptable during adaptation, but go on for too long and it begins to affect your health.

Another difficulty: it was great to be awake in the middle of the night, the same time as my three-week old girl, and my wife got a good deal more sleep than she would have done normally. However it was difficult at 10:30pm: I simply had to be asleep at that time for it to work, and often the baby still needed settling around them. My wife was pretty good about this, but she was tired too, and it felt like I wasn’t doing her any favours. I was basically getting more time for me, at the expense of being flexible for the family during the day/evening. As long as it didn’t affect them much it was fine, but after a certain point I’m just being selfish.

So, for multiple different reasons, I decided to call time on the experiment after about five days.

It’s important to stress that people who successfully implement a polyphasic sleep schedule persevere longer than I did, and have more success scheduling their naps. If I worked from home, with less commitments and meetings during the day, I can see how I might have been able to make it work. Ultimately, my life just isn’t fundamentally set up for this sleep pattern, and to a certain extent that’s reflected in society. It would have been difficult to find a place to crash for 20 minutes in central London, and it’s not something I could easily have explained to people.

What did I learn?

I got much better at napping. I’m able to fall asleep more easily now, for short periods, when I need to.

I learnt that our society isn’t set up for daytime naps. This might improve in the future if it catches on, who knows?

Your cognitive performance is super impaired when your brain thinks you should be sleeping. This sounds obvious :) but I didn’t think of it before starting: I was expecting to have lots of tasks done, but looking through my list at 3am when I was super tired only elicted perhaps one or two things I could manage. A lot of my work requires a fair amount of concentration, and I just couldn’t manage it.

This would hopefully have ceased to be a problem after a couple of weeks when I’d have stopped feeling so tired, but it also threw up another problem, and the biggest lesson I learnt: many of the old tasks on your list aren’t incomplete through lack of time, but through lack of motivation. If you remove lack of time from the equation, you start to see what you’ve been procrastinating about because you really just don’t want to do it. That was a challenge, and led me to think deeper about some of the things on my list that I’ve been putting on.

Would I try it again?

Perhaps. I think the life circumstances would need to be right, and the need for that extra time would need to be extreme. I don’t regret the experience though, and I’m grateful for the lessons learnt.

That was my story: what’s yours? Have you tried and succeeded, or failed? Any tips to share?

Posted in life, productivity, sleep | Comments Off

750words.com + GTD = Focus

Monday, July 12th, 2010

One of the best ways of managing your time and your tasks is David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) system. I’ve been a GTD adherent for the last four years. I’ve deviated a little from some of the practices in that time but never the principles (regular review, only care about stuff you can work on now, get it all out of your head).

However, one of the hardest things I’ve found to master is the concept of different levels of thinking to help you prioritise what to do next.

In GTD, to decide which tasks are more important than others, first you look at the context you are in and only consider tasks within that context. For example, it’s hard to blog when you’re in the supermarket, but it’s a handy time to remember you need to buy toothpaste. Then, you look at the time you have available (this isn’t worth starting as I don’t have time to finish it) and energy available (might not be a good idea to draft a difficult and taxing work proposal just before bed).

If you still can’t decide, then it gets interesting. GTD invites you to take a step back: moving from “ground” to “10,000ft”. Which project that these tasks are for will have the short-term effect I’m most interested in? Then step up another level, and another: which project advances my goals for the year? Which is the more important area I should be progressing now at this stage of my life? What meshes with my whole-life purpose?

These are deep questions, and I used to struggle to apply them to everyday task prioritisation. It seemed hard to remember where in my life purpose some of my more mundane tasks fitted, partly because I was thinking about deeper things much less frequently. So I left the “take a step back” method alone, going with what just felt right instead (which isn’t a bad way to prioritise to be honest).

However, through the power of 750words.com, I’ve finally managed to nail this part of GTD.

Morning Pages

There are many ways to clear your head and get yourself to focus. One is to write down everything you’re thinking about in an attempt to organise your thoughts. Some people call this Morning Pages: write three pages a day first thing in the morning, about anything and everything.

Morning pages is a great idea, but sometimes it’s difficult to motivate yourself to get on with private writing. Three pages seems a tall order to write every morning. That was, until I discovered 750words.com. This handy little site ensures that you not only do it, but that you do it every day. Using a full-featured incentive system of points, badges and challenges, you really don’t want to disappoint yourself by missing a day. The site gets you writing, and throws in some nifty writing statistics at the end of the process for some fun analysis of your state of mind. Heck, it even measures your typing speed, which comes in handy for Learn to Type Week!

I thought I’d give it a go a few weeks ago, as I had a fair amount on my mind at the time. What I didn’t realise was the effect it would have on my productivity. My mind was immediately clearer, and I was decisive and more focused. Blogging became easier again: once you’ve written 750 words of effectively brain-dump ‘whatever-you-want’ writing in the morning you are ready to keep on going with something more structured.

Because I use the time for fairly intense personal reflection, this practice unlocked the GTD prioritisation method. I’ve found that I’m moving up and down the GTD “ground”, “10,000ft”, “40,000ft” levels much more effectively. I often know just how a particular task fits into my life goal, as I’ve just written about that this morning. I’m naturally keeping the big picture in mind every day.

The word-crunching statistics that are produced over time are very telling. I’ve noticed an interesting effect now I’ve been doing it for the last three weeks: at first I found it hard to stop and all my writing was concerned with the present. Now it’s harder to think of what to write, but my thoughts are more valuable and much more reflective and deeper. I’m now using it to consider hard life decisions and priorities.

I’d very much recommend you try morning pages, especially if you struggle to focus, get carried away by random disparate thoughts or find it difficult to concentrate. I’m getting a lot out of it.

Posted in life, personal, productivity, writing | Comments Off

Pairing works for everything

Wednesday, January 27th, 2010

We’ve all heard much discussion and general chatter about the value of pair programming. Amongst other benefits, it focuses the mind, speeds knowledge transfer, and builds in code review.

What’s not talked about so often is the value of pairing on non-coding tasks. Does it add the same level of value? Many of us would naturally pair up on demanding tasks, when we are doing things that require the input of several people, or when we’re unsure about how to proceed. What happens if we make it an explicit part of our day to day work? What benefits would we see?

I’ve been trying where possible to pair explicitly on tasks at Eden in the last few weeks and to encourage others to do the same. We’ve found the following so far:

Pairing works on UX and Design. Spencer is currently teaching User Experience (UX) and Design skills to a number of people internally. Pairing on UX and design work really helps people to pick up skills in a particular tool such as Photoshop, but also drives discussion about design and flow which wouldn’t normally have arisen. We’ve found the result to be better output, and an increased confidence in the person who’s less experienced.

Pairing works on Sales and Business Development. Last week I paired up with Richard, one of the guys I’m mentoring at the moment, to send some sales emails to three or four potential clients. One of these was to a potential new customer who I knew was interested in speaking to us, but whom I’d not emailled before. In explaining my reasoning for the words I was writing, he was able to learn about how to structure emails such as this, and I got valuable insight into how I should approach the task from someone with a different point of view.

Pairing even works on VAT returns! When you’re doing necessary and repetitive tasks such as the preparing the quarterly VAT return, it really helps to have someone beside you spurring you on. Last month I had to prepare one of these returns, and half-jokingly asked whether anyone was interested in helping me out. Thankfully, Elliot stepped up to the challenge. He started learning which expenses fall into the four or five VAT categories that exist, and how to prepare and submit a return online. Just by explaining the vagaries of EU, exempt, zero-rated, and outside-scope expenses to someone else, the job went much quicker, all the figures were double-checked, and it was simply much more fun.

Clearly pairing isn’t going to work all the time. People often need space from others to think, to avoid distraction, and to recharge. Rather than being dogmatic, what I’m asking is this: at the moment non-pairing in our work is the default, and pairing is the exception. What if this was reversed? What difference would this make to our teams?

Next time you approach a non-coding task at work, perhaps have a think about whether a pair would be beneficial, or what someone might learn through working with you. I could well be wrong, but I’ve yet to find a task where pairing doesn’t add some benefit. Can anyone think of one?

Posted in --, --, --, --, agile, pair, productivity, programming, xp | Comments Off

SVG Planner

Tuesday, October 24th, 2006

By the way...

This content is now pretty old: check the homepage for the latest.

Welcome to SVG Planner - D*I*Y Planner style 3x5 Index Cards implemented in SVG.

Download

Why do this?

I used to print out the Day Keeper from D*I*Y Planner for my Hipster PDA every day, and fill it in by hand. I was also alternating between printing the cal-tex output of the Emacs Diary and trying to shoehorn that onto the cards, and filling in the Weekly Planners from D*I*Y planner.

A few things bothered me about these approaches:

  • D*I*Y Planner cards aren’t formatted in the right shape for an index card, so it always came out a little small when zoomed to fit on an index card (Update: Doug’s now fixed this with his excellent Hipster PDA version)
  • The pre-printed dates weren’t enough for my (very) long day.
  • The resolution and contrast wasn’t always correct for my laser printer.

So I’ve created an alternative in SVG. There are a few tweaks, mostly thanks to the increased length a portrait index card gives you - the Day Keeper has a longer day, and the Week Plan has space for more entries The nice thing about doing it in SVG is that anyone with a copy of Batik can easily roll out PNGs for whatever resolution their printer supports, and it’s very easy to edit and tweak for your own use. Feel free to do so; please send any useful mods so I can roll the best ones into this version If you want to ask questions or comment on any of this, feel free to email me

This product is a licensed derivative of the official D*I*Y Planner, and is so governed by the terms of the original Creative Commons Non-Commercial No-Derivatives license as owned and stipulated by Douglas Johnston of a million monkeys typing. It is therefore free to download and print for individual use, but not for any sort of enterprise or commercial printing, unless explicit permission is obtained from the copyright holder. Individual use within an enterprise is permitted, as this clause is waived.

Posted in DIY Planner, GTD, productivity, svg | Comments Off