Hacker News Reader

>I'm not going to say everybody needs the same amount of sleep.

I am going to go one step further and claim that anyone who says they work 10+ hour days regularly and are still productive is full of shit. I have seen too many of those people either burn up or not actually be able to keep up with me when crunch time comes and a two day caffeine and less legal binge is the only way to do what you know needs to get done to ship.

What I have seen for people who supposedly work ridiculous hours is a largely useless body warming a chair and keeping middle management happy by being easily visible and "manageable".

My impression is that people who spend 10+ hour day in work tend to spend a lot of time socializing, on facebook or otherwise wasting.

The problem often is that their needs to socialize and relax are not lower. Without realizing it, they started to use time spend in work to fulfill those needs. It slows down everybody, but looks good to management.

Which is my observation too.

For the sake of Yahoo I hope Marissa Mayer is just a liar because they might be still getting their moneys worth, even if she personally needs to feel like a hero by making claims about self sacrifice etc.

If she does what she says she does in terms of sleep, e.g. 130 hour weeks, then they are paying someone millions of dollars to make decisions in a state so impaired[1] that they would be better off just a random drunk bum on the street and asking him for his vision for Yahoo.

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1739867/

Everyone is not the same. I am definitely in the 8-hours-a-night camp, but a small percentage of the population seems to have a genetic variation that allows them to sleep much less.[1]

[1] http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405274870371250...

I'm sorry but I just don't buy this.

I'm Eastern European and when I was growing up I still had the cult of personality around Stalin in living memory. The sorts of claims they make about "short sleepers" there are exactly the kinds of claims that were made about Stalin and other high ranking Communists. This was the reason why they deserved to rule, just as these supposed short sleepers are the digital hyper capitalists who deserve to rule the world:

" Not only are their circadian rhythms different from most people, so are their moods (very upbeat) and their metabolism (they're thinner than average, even though sleep deprivation usually raises the risk of obesity). [...] "They encounter obstacles, they just pick themselves up and try again," [...]"Typically, at the end of a long, structured phone interview, they will admit that they've been texting and surfing the Internet and doing the crossword puzzle at the same time, all on less than six hours of sleep," says Dr. Jones. "There is some sort of psychological and physiological energy to them that we don't understand." "

Yet three years later there aren't any clinical studies that have followed these supermen for any prolonged period to see how they actually act in day to day life, just more self reports.

The dirty secret is drug use -- whether heavy caffeine or amphetamines. When we are young, pounding coffee or redbull is pretty much assumed necessary to get through a heavy credit load. Early 20s, stay up all night working and the body bounces back.

Start pushing 30 and in to middle age, these people are definitely using prescriptions drugs.

Or, they have a lot of meetings and only work for 2-3 hours.

Meetings are work and are even sometimes productive, no different to banging out code

I agree, and perhaps misspoke there.

However, I find that I have a limit to the number of hours I can program a day, and a number of hours in meetings I can have in a day, but the two don't interfere with each other much so long as I'm taking care of myself.

I think a healthy sustainable mix for maintaining flow over the long haul is probably something like - 4-5 hours coding, 0-2 hours meeting/collaboration, 1-2 hours email, 2 hours reading/writing, 1 hour lunch

I can work 10 hours a day and be quite productive. I don’t do it on a regular basis but when things get tough I can keep a schedule like that for weeks. Difference is though that I work from home. So I don’t spend time on various trivialities and I split my 10-hour work in two parts with a nice two hour nap in between. Also I’m an early riser. Starting my day at 5:30, by midday I've accumulated 6 hours of very productive work. I won't argue that working long hours is the smartest thing anyone can do but it's nice to know an effective way to do it if the need arises.

>>I am going to go one step further and claim that anyone who says they work 10+ hour days regularly and are still productive is full of shit.

I don't completely agree with that. People who achieve amazing things working even 16 hours a day are pretty common. I have done that many times in the past. When I did my engineering here in India. Preparing for public exams, and entrance exams- I have regularly worked on subjects like Math and Physics almost 15-17 hours a day. Most of friends who cracked the exams did the same. It happens all the time.

When I worked at the call center, I would show up at work at 1 AM in the night, get back to home by 11 AM, sleep till 4-5 PM in the afternoon and then work towards learning programming till 12 in the night again. I would do this thing every day, for months. Most Indian IT giants who get outsourced projects routinely over work their employees, I worked for one in the early part of my career.

But again its also about practice, and how much you can take. Most of it psychological. You can never do anything, you have convinced yourself that you can't do.

You will be surprised how long you can go sleepless, when that is the only option you have.

In my own experience, in the "short term" it really comes down to motivation / inspiration. If you are sufficiently motivated, overworking yourself seems to be far less painful, and productivity doesn't really seem to be impacted. I've certainly pulled all-nighters before with code going into production pretty successfully.

I specifically put short term in quotes because I'm not sure how I would define it. It probably depends on a lot of factors, but I wouldn't stretch it past several weeks. Way past that, motivation also seems to be highly impacted, and you become the kind of tired, error prone zombie who stretches out their 8 hours of work over 16.

I agree.

Actually its about knowing when to sleep than sleeping less always, more like when to accelerate and when to brake. I guess that's what Edison did too.

Many times over a period what you really need is long stretches of un interrupted time to get something big done. You will have to take a break after that. Come back with a fresh purpose, an new challenge and start again.

One of XP's guiding principles is "Never work overtime for longer than one week."

It's OK to work an 80-hour week. You can get a lot done. But the next week needs to be a 40-hour week, or the pace isn't sustainable.

It isn't necessarily an iron-clad rule, but it's a pretty good rule of thumb. Past one week, you're just hurting your productivity.

My experience bears this out as a fairly accurate guide.

> I don't completely agree with that. People who achieve amazing things working even 16 hours a day are pretty common. I have done that many times in the past. When I did my engineering here in India. Preparing for public exams, and entrance exams- I have regularly worked on subjects like Math and Physics almost 15-17 hours a day. Most of friends who cracked the exams did the same. It happens all the time.

I disagree. I spent part of my high school in India and I have worked on Indian engineering entrance exams. They did involve extensive amount of working through problems. There was more memorizing rather than abstract problem solving. I am not convinced the amount of clear headed thinking that was needed to perform practice drills on problem sets is the same as I need when I need to design something new or write theoretical proofs.

Not that you can't go rage hard and convince yourself you can pull an all-nighter or whatever. I have only found that at the end of the day there are two results:

a) The stuff that you make is not up to spec.

b) You are tired the next day and your productivity is fucked.

I prefer the long race.

> There was more memorizing rather than abstract problem solving.

FWIW, you need sleep for memorizing as well. Stuff just won't stick if you don't cement it with a good night's rest.

Cramming it all the night just before an exam does work though, I did that myself too, but I think it only worked because I already had a solid foundation. Also that will never work for "insight" type of questions, just rote memorization.

>When I did my engineering here in India. Preparing for public exams, and entrance exams- I have regularly worked on subjects like Math and Physics almost 15-17 hours a day.

And did you cut this down to (even) 10 hours and observe real changes in productivity?

>Most of it psychological.

No. You get physical symptoms from sleep depredation. You can't think these problems away but you can convince yourself you aren't having them. Doesn't actually change your body's need for sleep.

http://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/excessive-sleepiness-10...?

From the article:

Sleep Loss Impairs Judgment, Especially About Sleep

Lack of sleep can affect our interpretation of events. This hurts our ability to make sound judgments because we may not assess situations accurately and act on them wisely.

Sleep-deprived people seem to be especially prone to poor judgment when it comes to assessing what lack of sleep is doing to them. In our increasingly fast-paced world, functioning on less sleep has become a kind of badge of honor. But sleep specialists say if you think you’re doing fine on less sleep, you’re probably wrong. And if you work in a profession where it’s important to be able to judge your level of functioning, this can be a big problem.

“Studies show that over time, people who are getting six hours of sleep, instead of seven or eight, begin to feel that they’ve adapted to that sleep deprivation -- they’ve gotten used to it,” Gehrman says. “But if you look at how they actually do on tests of mental alertness and performance, they continue to go downhill. So there’s a point in sleep deprivation when we lose touch with how impaired we are.”

Sleep plays a critical role in thinking and learning. Lack of sleep hurts these cognitive processes in many ways. First, it impairs attention, alertness, concentration, reasoning, and problem solving. This makes it more difficult to learn efficiently.

Second, during the night, various sleep cycles play a role in “consolidating” memories in the mind. If you don’t get enough sleep, you won’t be able to remember what you learned and experienced during the day.

>You will be surprised how long you can go sleepless, when that is the only option you have

Doesn't mean it's healthy. Doesn't mean that you are performing at max capacity.

Well said. I personally know someone who just recently qualified with a first in medicine. She claims that she achieved this by getting a good nights sleep every night (i.e. 9 hours). She claims that this is what enabled her to qualify to do medicine also. All her classmates in college did exactly what kamaal describes (I have done it myself). They worked all the hours they could get because they were so afraid they wouldn't make it. And they passed their exams. But they didn't get a first. She said she spoke to a few of them a few times saying how ineffective this was, that medicine is hard and to build up a mental map and solid understanding you need sleep. As a well slept person she could see how ineffective they were. But it takes discipline and confidence (and maybe a bit of devil may care) not to panic and most people don't seem to be able to do this in the face of what they think are very tough odds.

My own observation on programming (significantly less taxing than studying medicine - no matter how you slice it) is that you can do a few late nights but after that it becomes drastically ineffective and the people involved get more and more dunning kruger about it. In the end the whole "push" consists of almost entirely ego and bullshit and the code is appalling.

> Most Indian IT giants who get outsourced projects routinely over work their employees

I've had to oversee a number of those for very large orgs and can vouch that the quality was consistently beyond terrible and caused no end of problems. Most of the work done that way was eventually thrown away.

> I am going to go one step further and claim that anyone who says they work 10+ hour days regularly and are still productive is full of shit.

It depends on the type of work, work environment, and people one's working with.

One environment I've worked in had almost nothing but 'performance budget' and 'risk budget' defined. It was fascinating for myself, a 20-something at the time, to sit in a quite comfortable office for 12 hour stretches just looking at numbers and figuring out interesting things to do. Invigorating, in fact, with almost no pressure, just fun.

In another I ended up in quite a large organisation as regional 'service delivery head' which basically meant fielding several hundred emails per day across quite a broad timezone. Despite a an array of systems hacked together across several decades, and perhaps that was the fun, the team and I were pretty productive, however defined, and cut operating expenses by a considerable margin. Less blue-sky, more operations focused, but fun long hours nonetheless.

Having a child was quite a learning experience: we're all learning, all of the time, and we're also doing stuff, all of the time. I now work for myself, and view time on HN, or watching recordings of STTNG, or walking in a local park, or going to local university art displays, very legitimately as productive time, as I'm exposed to others' views, findings, methods, and inspirations of people that create something great.

I've never filled in a timesheet.

About 1-3% of the population needs 5 hours or less of sleep: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405274870371250....

> If I can get in the zone and achieve peak productivity for 8 hours that is an extremely successful day.

The reason going to office takes more than 8 hours of productive work is because in an office environment, there is other stuff to do. Go to lunch with co-workers, attend meetings, help someone on something minor. These are things that take some percentage of your time and that adds up. For example, a few weeks back I was working from Austin. I was insanely productive because I could spend long stretches of time quietly thinking and producing.

The biggest worry for me is to stay distraction free and focused for 6-8 hours. Anyone claiming to be working 10-12 hours are just killing time.