Comment by Jtsummers | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jtsummers | Hacker News Reader

I did an analysis on my own time once, ignoring the breakdown of my work day and just focusing on overall time available:

  1130-0000 - prepare for bed, relax
  0000-0600 - sleep (roughly)
  0600-0700 - stuff (shower, shave, personal email)
  0700-1630 - work + lunch + commutes

So I had 7 hours each day I was "leaving on the table". Most of it was spent on TV or video games, possibly socializing. I felt exhausted from work so I didn't want to do anything. But realizing I was "wasting"[0] 35 hours a week of my time. Reprioritized, started going to the gym, setting aside the block between work and gym for language study or reading. By the time the gym is done, while I may be tired, I'm in a totally different mental frame from work and can actually get work done on my side projects or more reading or more socializing (that shower after leaves me feeling refreshed, even when I feel like I've been hit by a freight train after BJJ takedown practices).

[0] In the sense that I had things I wanted to do but they never got completed due to poor prioritization.

0000-0600 - sleep (roughly)

I must admit I am always a bit jealous of people like you who can function on 6 hours sleep every day. After 3 days of that I am wreck.

I used to make it on 6 hours a night, easily.

Then I started college and it went up to 8, for some reason.

Recently I stopped drinking. I'm back to 6.

In my experience, every beer adds 1 hour of sleep.

In my experience, this only happens to me is it is more than 2 beers, later than 10pm in the evening :)

I will admit, I am very lucky in that regard. Just comparing against the recommended amount of sleep, I get an extra 14 hours a week. And I can actually function quite well on less, but not sustained (and never deliberately try to reach that state, but bouts of insomnia have forced me to learn this).

I do tend to sleep in on the weekends though ("sleep" isn't quite right, more like lazily stay in bed until 0900 or so while drifting in and out).

I do this. Almost exactly. Asleep at 11 pm, up at 5:30. Lazy on weekends.

The person was also exhausted every day, by their own admission. I feel pity, not jealousy.

I was exhausted mentally, not physically, from work. Which is why I've been able to maintain that and add in 2 hours (average) gym time each weeknight. Applying the same analysis to work allowed me to better manage those 8 hours a day as well, so my mental exhaustion from that almost entirely stopped.

Though I initially saw an increase in my time sleeping (to about 7 hours) when I started (and now, since I took a break out of laziness). After about 3-4 weeks, my body gets better conditioned to the level of effort and I go back to about 6 hours of sleep a night.

For context, my exercising is: 2x5k/week (~0.5 hour each), 2x1.5 hour BJJ class, 2x1 hour wrestling, 2x1 hour BJJ, 2x1.25 hour soccer games. So roughly 10.5 hours a week. Very physically exhausting to jump back into that full schedule, though I find the fatigue remarkably satisfying (knowing that it's been earned).

You should start measuring the quality of your sleep using apps like Sleep Cycle. I used to be exactly the same way. Then I realized that the reason I was sleeping for 9-10 hours was because my sleep was "shallow" and kept getting interrupted. It all changed drastically after I optimized my sleeping environment: totally dark, 68 degrees year around, appropriate mattress type for my sleeping position, etc.

Now I can get by comfortably with 6-7 hours of sleep.

Apps can also wake you up at the right time, as opposed to during deep sleep. That makes it easier to wake up as well.

Would you recommend Sleep Cycle the most? Do they require the phone physically on your bed or nearby?

After an update about a year ago, it only requires being nearby (nightstand works for me) and uses sound to do the sensing.

Cool, I'll give it a try tonight!

I'm fond of Sleep As Android

Yes, using ear plugs more consistently would likely help improve quality. Housing quality where I live (NZ) is abysmal, and you hear all outside noises very clearly. It's half between living in a well built house and living in a tent.

As an alternative to ear plugs, perhaps also consider noise _replacement_ instead (eg. vs. noise _elimination).

I use an app that plays various rain sounds. I have it linked to speakers via Bluetooth (and I have a 3.5mm headphone-jack-type extension audio cable that I've run to my bedside table as an option, if I'm feeling picky about the sound quality of my rain ).

It's very relaxing, and blocks most outdoor sounds. I live in NZ, and the houses here are usually pretty thin-walled and consequently offer almost no sound deadening. This mostly-fixes/avoids that.

Perhaps you don't like rain, and so different sounds might be appropriate... I don't like anything else really apart from maybe low volume white noise, but that's me... but yeah, regardless of which sounds you pick, the general approach is worth trying!

I always just used a box fan, but the apps are a good idea.

You can get used to it. In college, I had a semester where I was taking 6 classes, half of them project heavy grad classes. I only pulled one all nighter (that was on me) that semester, but I was regularly getting 5-6h of sleep when it wasn't Friday or Saturday. After a few weeks, it wasn't that bad until spring break came around. I got used to getting 8h again, so I had to readapt back to 6h.

Me too. I only feel at my best if I'm consistently getting 8 hours. A few days of 7 hours and I start to feel overly tired. Turn that down to 6 hours and I turn into an awful person.

My wife hardly ever sleeps more that 6-6.5 hours so she basically gets 2 extra hours a day compared to me. This has been true for me as long as I can remember (36 year old male)

Is there any difference in your level of fitness? I need a lot of sleep as well.

The more physically active/fit you are the longer you have to sleep.

sources: http://hackerella.com/sleep-challenge/

https://www.fatiguescience.com/blog/infographic-why-athletes...

It's a double-edged sword. I go to sleep between 12 and 12:45 every night, and wake up almost exactly six hours later without an alarm. It's great when waking up for work, it's really irritating on the weekends that I want to sleep in on.

One of the things I learned a while ago is that there is really no point in complaining about being busy -- because "busy" is so subjective and virtually everyone views themselves as "busy" until they start tracking their time like you did.

I had the same realization with respect to money some time ago, which partially motivated analyzing my time budget. Budgeting of resources is crucial to understanding what you have and don't have (and need and don't need). It's difficult to do when you're feeling stressed/pressured, however. Which leads to a downward spiral for many people (or a "just hanging in there" loop).

I can't squeeze more than 4-6 hours of intellectually productive hours out of a day. I may delude myself into thinking I can do more, but it's not sustainable.

Not all work is (or needs to be) "intellectually productive."

I see statements like this on HN a lot, particularly from developers (myself included), but most of them cringe at the thought of having 2-4 hours of administrative work every day.

Software Design is intellectually productive. If you aren't, you are not designing and implementing software.

I actually disagree - maybe 60% of good software dev is really really thinking. A lot of it is automatic, based on learning the crafts good habits, repeating motifs, testing can be repetitive but is important to do as you go. Making sample data, talking to people writing emails - so there is a chunk that is not deep foo.

This correlates with my anecdotal observation that the smartest people can write bad code, and it takes them quite a while to absorb the stuff of writing good code.. a couple years at minumum perhaps. Its not just about raw thinking power - perhaps the important bits are, but not all of it.

What sort of work would you class as administrative?

Meta-tasks around projects. Communicating/coordinating with other people. In big-corp land, mandatory training and time spent on time tracking (a bit ironic). Dealing with git screw-ups by people new to it.

I think the problem is when such administrative work interrupts the intellectually productive work.

I think another key component of administrative work is that even if it's time sensitive, it's not urgent.

> Dealing with git screw-ups by people new to it.

I do this all the time. Of course, the person new to it is usually myself.

That's why I go to the gym, or clean my apartment, or cook a nice meal for myself (GF lives in another country so currently solo-cooking most nights), and call my GF.

I used to have really bad habits with respect to keeping my apartment clean. Not dirty, but just generally messy (bathrooms were terrible though, I'll admit). And it was because of the time it would take to do it. Acknowledging my true time budget I now keep a nice, though not spotless, apartment because I take 15 minutes each day to straighten something up. Some areas need a Saturday morning to tackle. But the bathroom is cleaned once a week. The floors get cleaned throughout the month in segments.

If you've ever spent time on money management with tools like YNAB or Mint, it's very similar. You realize where your time is going, and what time is left available. You mete it out in reasonable amounts to the tasks that need to be done. When I'd only clean my apartment once a month (at best) it was a major undertaking. It was intimidating and I'd skip months because of that. Amortize the time cost across the month, it's now "easy", and my apartment takes 20 minutes to get ready for company in the worst case of short notice from friends.

The book "your money or your life" would content that because work is exhausting you, in essence, it is "costing you" the work hours plus the hours to recoup. So count those all as work hours now...the real cost as it were :)

But it's also possible that you're just relaxing because you can or what not, dunno. Cheers!

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