[padobson]

I identify with this.

I heard somewhere that certain high performing folks only need five hours of sleep a night. I tried this for a week and it was a disaster. Damage to work. Damage to relatonships, etc.

But it did lead me to a years long experiment to discover my limits for sleep (while also struggling to understand how diet and caffeine intake interact).

I just finished a year where I aimed for 49 hours of sleep per week (5 nights of 6 hours, 2 nights of 8 hours, 1 or 2 naps of 1.5-3 hrs), and after 11+ months I started having the same problems I had from the initial 5hr/night experiment that last only a week.

So I've accepted I'm not a 35/hr a week guy. I might be a 45/hr a week guy, with precise diet/exercise/caffeine dosing, but in the meantime I'm comfortable accepting decent productivity at 55/hr a week.

[michaelbuckbee]

There's that old tale of the people chopping wood but one takes a bunch of breaks but chops way more wood than the other, and it turns out every time they took a break that they were sharpening their axe.

That's what sleep is to me, the most effective nootropic "sharpening the axe" you can do for your productivity. Unfortunately, that doesn't quantify easily like "hours of sleep" so it's harder to track.

[fragmede]

I'm not a sleep scientist, but Fitbit's advanced sleep tracking has been a boon for me to collect data on how I'm sleeping.