Review sleepyti.me bedtime calculator (my weekend project) | Hacker News Reader

Review sleepyti.me bedtime calculator (my weekend project)

sleepyti.me

4 pointsdavid_shaw6 comments

It's simple and beautiful, but I'm just not sure how much value it has as a web app. Pretty much, the only real information you're giving to the user is:

* Sleep cycles typically last 90 minutes

* The average adult human takes fourteen minutes to fall asleep

Unless you add some personalization, user-specific memory, or some other value, it's not gonna be more useful than just a blog post containing the above two facts.

This is useful feedback, thank you! I'd like to note that I did create this project as a weekend hobby project, not necessarily a webapp designed to sell anything.

I'd tend to agree with you, though, that all the webapp really does is count backwards in increments of ninety minutes.

I considered adding user-specific memory, but decided against it because it seemed more straightforward to enter the time you need to wake up the next day than to login, enter details, retrieve sleep schedule and then check wake times. Maybe an added feature for registered members could be learning what time the user needs to wake up each day, so the user would simply look at a glance and see their bedtimes for the week.

Again, thanks for the feedback!

I'm also rather unconvinced that the 90-minute sleep cycle thing is particularly accurate for everybody. If your own sleep cycles are just ten percent off from this value, you're screwed.

Also, after telling it I wanted to be up at 6am, it recommended bedtimes anywhere between 9pm and 1:30 am. Is it trying to imply that I'd be better off with four and a half hours worth of sleep than with eight hours, even though eight hours isn't a multiple of 90 minutes?

The theory behind it is that, yes, you will wake up more refreshed with three hours of sleep than four, because if you wake up mid-cycle you will be terribly groggy (a problem I suffer from fairly often).

The large range of sleep (four times) is designed to matchup with most peoples' typical length of sleep (six to ten hours).

As far as differences in sleep cycles, you are totally correct. My research led me to determine that ninety minutes is generally accepted as the total length of four stages of sleep, but any variance from that will skew the results. That said, the vast majority of people (supposedly) complete the four stages of sleep in about 90 minutes.

Actually I like it, and while I wouldn't call it beautiful, I think it has utility just as it is. I'd consider porting it to an iPhone or Android app, too - it might find the biggest audience there and more recurring users.

While I don't think there's a huge amount of mileage in personalising it into a sleep log system, I do think there's some value in reversing it:

It is now 23:27. If you assume it takes me 14 minutes to fall asleep, what are the optimal time choices I should set my alarm for?

I like this idea! I originally designed it because I always knew what time I needed to get up to complete my morning routine and get to work on time, but it would be cool to customize my alarm (to the nearest 90 minutes) to when I finally get tired and go to bed. Great idea, and thank you!

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