Tired? The importance of letting ideas marinate and percolate through sleep | Hacker News Reader

Tired? The importance of letting ideas marinate and percolate through sleep

nytimes.com

27 pointsrobg15 comments

After spending 8 years not getting any sleep, I finally realized that I'm more efficient with real sleep. I finally wised up. In retrospect, my dumbest mistakes have mostly been due to being chronically sleep deprived. Amongst engineers and scientists, a lack of sleep is a point of pride. We feel like those stupid liberal arts majors are getting no real work done and that we're tired because we are. Whether the conjecture about liberal arts majors is correct, the sleep part is wrong. I'm so much more efficient now that I'm getting more sleep. I've been trying to get my friends to sleep more, but we'll see how that goes....

artists, musicians, writers and soldiers also get macho about sleep deprivation. I'm not sure if they really fall into what people mean when they talk disparagingly about the "liberal arts." It would seem strange to stay up for days reading sociology textbooks.

I make it very much a point, being a scientist full time, not to ever drink coffee (neither tea), and to go to sleep whenever I need to.

I am glad you realized you needed your share of sleep.

I just started reading 'Founders at Work' and find it kind of funny that they cite Steve Jobs in this article, when during his interview, Woz said that some of their best ideas (when building Apple) came after several days of not sleeping.

My own anecdata are somewhat conflicted on this issue. I always did well in school, understanding the key issues in a design problem (aerospace engineering) long before my classmates, and I always attributed it to my sleep habits (8-10 hrs daily).

On the other hand, some of my finest moments of clarity have come after all-night cramming sessions. It's as if you fatigue all the usual pathways and are open up to entirely new ways of seeing things.

"... Woz said that some of their best ideas (when building Apple) came after several days of not sleeping ..."

Don't confuse working on a problem for a long time, understanding it very clearly with having the idea in your head and regurgitating a solution in one long stint. Woz emphasized this in his 2005 Startup School talk. Understanding an idea so completely in your head you can simplify it no more.

I'm not confusing anything, just restating what he said in his interview with Jessica. The actual quote is "When you get very, very tired -- and I had been up for four nights all night long; Steve and I got mononucleosis -- your head gets in this real creative state and it thinks of ideas that you'd normally just throw out."

There was a study a few years ago (unfortunately I don't have the link handy) that showed that the lack of sleep is directly correlated to a spike in creativity.

Edit: here's a wiki article about the topic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_and_creativity

Bodybuilders and weightlifters know that muscle grows in one's sleep. I think the key to working on anything into the night is following up with lots of sleep. That way, one gets the benefit of both sleep and sleep deprivation.

Every once in a while in the past, when I was working on my own project, I've done it to the point where I would sleep from 2am to 1pm, and the next time living in the dark for a day due to going to bed around sunrise (5am) and waking up at sundown (6pm), and so on. Eventually, I would have a normal schedule again. :) This was when my only focus was on writing code for my software and working out, period. Since my software became better every week, and I grew stronger, bigger, and faster as well, my goals were pretty much met and I was happy.

I like my current life as a student, due to the social aspect of learning from, and working with, others. But I am nowhere near as productive at developing my own software on a daily basis nor working out as I was when those were my only two goals. However, I understand that it has only been a few weeks, and I will be able to figure out how to introduce software and personal development into my schedule as I get more used to the demands of my classes. And even though I won't be able to dedicate as much time as I could before, I have the experience and confidence to get in shape and create software more efficiently, as well as the benefit of a being around lots of potential users.

I've done this, and find that it works really poorly for me. If I'm not going to bed at roughly the same time and getting up at roughly the same time, I just stay muddled all day, even when I'm technically getting ~8 hours. If I stay on a schedule, I wake up without an alarm after 6-7 hours and I'm fully awake all day.

While I agree with the message of the article -- sleep can be really productive, the assumption with the connection to entrepreneurship seems to be that creativity is the key to success. At least at the point we're at, while creativity is not to be underrated, mostly it's just a mountain of stuff to get done and most of it less than brainiac work.

As an undergraduate math major with plenty of difficult classes, I have discovered the power of sleep in solving problems. I have spent hours and hours on a problem to no avail. I then fall asleep and the next morning I solve it very quickly. Amazing stuff.

Von Neumann used to prove theorems in his sleep.

So sleeping did not impede him working 24 hours a day. It actually helped.

I agree. For me the trick is to balance: you can sleep 4 hours a day for several days, but only after having slept very well for several days. A.k.a. resting periods alternated with high tension, full-speed periods [in the order of days, not weeks].

Some problems become easier when I'm sleepy because I can't think as clearly but I start to focus very well.

Other problems demand several passes of experimentation. For those it's easier to try a quick test during the day, think about it while doing other things, and then wake up with the (possible) solution the next day.

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