Personally, I am getting about 5 to 6 hours of sleep per night for about 2 weeks, and then I have a big sleep of about 10hours after that.
Edit: More info.
Anything less than 7 and I get "brain fog." And my day is essentially ruined. Hard to be productive when your mind is mush.
Cannot tell if I am the strange exception or if only the exceptional cases (e.g. 5 hrs etc) are posting here. Kind of like asking people their height, only the people who are the extreme end of the spectrum give an answer and the whole thing looks warped.
OTOH I have noticed that in these foggy days, especially in the afternoon, I get very creative insights. I just write them down because I can't use them on that day, but after a good night of sleep these insights come very handy in the next days.
EDIT: that's before I stopped coffee. My sleep pattern has been irregular these last few days. I don't enough data yet, but I seem to need less sleep. I guess my average will go below 10, maybe down to 9h. I'll see in a year.
EDIT2: I'm obviously not counting "crash coding" sessions. I may stay awake for 36h, with serious pain in old injuries past the 24h mark, and hallucinations past that 36h limit. My productivity seems low after 24h, so I don't bother and just go to bed.
Step 2: refuse to use it outside your home. That's more active, and may require a commitment. You can start by allowing yourself to drink one every other day, to mitigate withdrawal symptoms.
Decaf etc - I can't say how useful it is, I wanted to cut coffee and not replace an habit by another one. No more coke or redbull either, since the problem here is caffeine: the active ingredient in coffee is also present in coke and redbull and the likes (pepsi, monster, ...)
Google plus support group : https://plus.google.com/communities/113447576520287991560
So far, I have been very dysfunctional during the first 2 days, and at my 4th day I feel normal. I was expecting to feel bad for up to 9 days.
It has had an interesting effect: it seems like I need less sleep, something I noticed when I tried to reduce the dosage these last weeks (not quitting altogether), and completely counterintuitive!
It may be just a normal variation due to a very small sample size. I would be curious to see how much sleep I will need in a year from now. Of course, your results may vary.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/jun/02/drinking-coffe...
A really good comment I read on HN a few days ago recommended that I set an alarm for going to bed not for waking up, It's been working really well for me.
I can get more done in one extra hour in the morning than I can in two or three hours past the time my body needs to go to sleep.
My take on it is that I sleep when I'm tired, with the asterisk that I have work in the morning most days, and that means I should try to be tired before 11:30p. But I also look at it like I look at treatment of my laptop battery - if I spend more effort worrying about and attempting to optimize the thing than it's worth, then that is effort wasted. The best I can hope for is good sleep when I am sleeping.
All of that said, sleep is obviously important since we all do it. I wouldn't make a habit of not sleeping so I could ship, but I also wouldn't let shipping get in the way of many things, like time with my family. Maybe my priorities are messed up, but they're mine.
That said, I've been doing this for almost a decade when I was in graduate school and working full time.
Over the last 13 years I've probably put on 10-15 lbs. I try to exercise at LEAST 3 times a week while eating as healthy as I can within reason.
Sleep is critical for memory retention, keeping up your immune system, maintaining serotonin level, general stress relief, etc. With that said if you have to you can adapt running on limited amounts. You'll have to be careful w/ weight gain or depression.
I admit I'm a bit amazed to see the number of folks who report sleeping 10 or more hours a night; I've been assuming normal sleeping habits were around 8 hours a night.
Personally, I do best on 8 a night (i.e., waking without an alarm), but I sacrifice quite a bit of sleep trying to work more or less full time but also be a more or less full-time parent to a 4-year-old and a 7-month-old.
The trickiest part is finding long unbroken stretches of time to concentrate on harder problems; I can manage emails while distracted, or in short bursts, and simpler coding tasks, but solving trickier problems usually happens in the middle of the night.
I tend to alternate sleeping 2-3 hours one night (e.g., 6-8am), then 7-8 the next. I feel mostly normal even on the days when I'm running a more serious deficit and don't generally feel sleepy during the day, though I can tell when the side-effects (reduced patience, mental errors, etc.) are creeping up more, and I'll try to spend a few nights in a row sleeping more.
I don't generally drink anything caffeinated, particularly when I'm running on little sleep, or if I'm planning on staying up to work -- it seems to affect me much more when I'm seriously sleep-deprived, giving me an unpleasant jittery feeling; the worst part is that I can't sleep when I want to, but my concentration is ruined, so there's no longer any point to staying awake.
This seems to work well for me, as I have had pretty much perfect physical and mental health for the last 10 years (nothing but the occasional cold about once a year or so), and I have high motivation, productivity, etc.
I find that consistently getting 6 hours is survivable, but if I do it for too long I feel quite sluggish mentally.
On the weekends the strict schedule goes out the window. I go to bed when I get home or if its a night in when I'm tired, and wake up whenever it feels right.
My problem stems mostly from the 7 years I spent working a night shift at a grocery store. It completely flipped my sleep cycle script and I'm about 400% more efficient/focused between 10pm and 4am than I am at any other time during the day/night.
I exercise around 2-3am daily, too, so that must contribute to my increased alertness during the night.
I'm usually ineffective until about 10am, then good until the midafternoon, when I have trouble focusing for awhile, then good until the evening slump (transitioning out of work) then good until 2am-4am.
Anyway, I usually get 6 hours on weekdays and feel crap for an hour before brushing my teeth etc.
I feel the same with 6-9 hours of sleep. Any less and I notice it though.
But in the weekend I sleep a lot. Maybe 12h a day.
I wish I could have more time to balance it(and my plan is that I will in the future), 8 hours a day would be ideal.
Based on that, I averaged that I needed 8 hours of in-bed time to get 7 hours of deep sleep, and then I had no need for the device anymore. Until my sleep patterns change.