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by jandrewrogers 523 days ago
Decades ago I did a free-running sleep schedule for a few months while working a fairly intensive software project that required almost no interaction with others. I didn’t have a schedule, I just slept when I felt like it, and did resistance training throughout the day when I felt like it (I had a bunch of gym equipment in the same room as computers). Empirically, this turned into 26 hour days, so my hours came into phase with “normal” hours roughly every two weeks. It was a pretty comfortable lifestyle, felt pretty healthy, and I put on some muscle.

The main challenges were two-fold. First, there is a significant part of the time where it doesn’t line up with store and restaurant hours that well, which is inconvenient. Second, there are few days every couple weeks where your schedule is completely out-of-phase with normal people which makes socializing nigh impossible on those days e.g. waking up at 8pm and going to bed at 2pm. However, since those days were predictable, I’d simply not schedule anything on those days.

I don’t think this really works for a global business though. Many people around the world are really fussy about rigid schedules, and you will only overlap those a third of the time.

All that said, I think for >24 hour days to be practical, it would be best in a synthetic environment where everyone is on the same clock with limited access to natural sunlight. I could totally imagine it being viable for something like a submarine.

2 comments

I did a similar experiment for 14 days when I was 13-14ish, it balanced out to 20-30 minutes wake and a 5 to 10 min nap.

It was pretty wild. I coded (machine code) in bed until my head got heavy then I would nap and wake up shortly after with the task noticably organized in my head. It felt perfectly natural to sleep on it as well as to wake up when the data was parsed. I kinda lived in the twilight zone.

Fun details: the room was perfectly dark. The tv was set to be so dark that I had to wait for my eyes to adjust to see the code. Nothing else was visible. The bed was tilted about a foot. The computer had no mouse pointer.

I'll bet a lot of people did that experiment at the beginning of covid.