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Comment by DecayingOrganic | Hacker News Reader

They employed 452 adults for a one-month data-entry job, which the authors say it's "a relatively cognitively-demanding task intended to be sensitive to sleep deprivation."

As a side note, the study also says that short afternoon naps increased productivity.

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Because of a combination of health, family, and time zone issues, I sleep approximately 5 hours a night (6 or 7 on weekends, if I'm lucky). I also have a complex work environment where the ability to think quickly, have excellent recall, and make quick decisions is paramount (I manage two dev teams working on two very different code bases, facing very different challenges). The people I work with are often "the smartest person in the room" and notice slips and mistakes.

Anyway, I get by through a combination of sneaking naps, trying not to sabotage myself by eating/living poorly, and catching up when I can.

I suspect the people in this study do the same. They probably doze when on public transportation, or trying to get the kids to sleep, you'll lay down with them and sleep a little. These stolen moments add up. Also, learning to recognize the signs of mental fatigue - if you can't get rest, then, you have to slow down and double check everything, not get irritable, and defer major decisions.

I'm...extremely skeptical a generic "data entry job" is "high cognitive demand".

I can write new applications (atrociously) on basically no sleep, so I'm pretty skeptical "sit at this desk and enter these things" swings one way or the other (or even has much of an ability to quality check - at least the compiler will yell at me when I'm egregiously wrong).

I'd be far more interested if these people could be trusted to run heavy machinery on that schedule, or engage in a creative or hands on task like carpentry or welding. I suspect the results would be quite different.

I just got a good laugh out of the image of a study putting sleep deprived people in charge of heavy machinery for science.

They're called grad students :)

I'm...extremely skeptical a generic "data entry job" is "high cognitive demand".

Same here. While writing the GP comment, I considered using that exact example as something that I wouldn't expect to be heavily impacted by moderate sleep deprivation.

You're not "economically poor". If the economically poor had such creative jobs, our economy would work very differently.

I agree with the claim that they are sensitive to sleep deprivation, though.

Chennai's extremely hot. Having been there, intuitively I'd suspect a Spain-like siesta would work very well there and boost productivity.

The nights there are extremely warm too. I wonder if that's a factor in ensuring that 5.5 hours of sleep is no worse than 8?

I don't know how well it compares to a spanish siesta but the abstract ends with "In contrast, short afternoon naps at the workplace improved an overall index of outcomes by 0.12 standard deviations, with significant increases in productivity, psychological well-being, and cognition, but a decrease in work time."

*5.5 vs about 6. The study increased their sleep by 27 minutes, they were still under-slept by 2 hours.

AFAIK not anything below 8 hours qualifies as “under-sleeping”; instead, the need of sleep typically varies between 6 to 9 hours for healthy adults.

Which averages out to 7.5. So the average should have been in that range with outliners at 6 and 9

Wow. That should have been in the abstract. 452 adults hired for a one-month job intended to be sensitive to sleep deprivation sounds pretty robust.

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