I am facing yet another day of utter sleep deprivation tomorrow... most of this is from work stress I think, and a good chunk of that is because Ive never in my life been able to force myself to really focus on something that wasn’t fun/engrossing in its own right. Luckily, programming physics is usually engrossing and fun, but when I am being closely managed, the old traits come out and sleep soon goes by the board due to stress from slow progress. I can handle micromanagement during the “code-up-the-solver” stage, but then when I have to deal with yet another rewrite of the infrastructure code... the mind wanders to, say field theory, the weather, or hacker news. It reminds me greatly of back in my school days. I could never really focus on the content of my studies properly — not until after being dumped out of undergrad with a lackluster gpa and no good future prospects. Only then, with nobody looking, caring, or expecting, curiosity and motivation switched on properly.

From the article: “ Dr Robert Stickgold has shown that people who learn a skill during the day do not show significant improvement until they get 7-8 hours of good sleep[1]”

Wow, I have had that a handful of nights in the past 3 years.