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Comment by blrgeek | Hacker News Reader

Naps save me every time. Just when my work starts flagging and quality starts dropping, a 20min nap makes me feel almost as fresh as I am coming into the office in the morning.

Most others at work feel awkward about taking naps - even with me evangelising naps :o)

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I have to admit, I'd feel awkward taking naps in my office.

What I usually do is go to my car in the parking garage and nap there. It works wonders; I recognize that the 15 min that I lose to the nap would have been lost to my brain being a foggy mess, so the nap is a net gain.

My desk/cube is on the main corridor with low cube walls, and everyone walking past me sees me napping - I don't give a damn :)

My wife has done the napping in the car bit earlier in her career.

When I was at my company's office in China, I envied my coworkers that took naps after lunch. They would just tilt their head back and relax/nap. I tried it but my head always falls forward waking me up.

Many people see that as an advantage of sleeping in chairs. The point of a nap is to get to a state where you're totally relaxed, not to spend a significant amount of time in it. You don't want to get into the deep sleep state which takes ~1 hour to wake up from.

The apocryphal example is Salvador Dali: he held a spoon above a metal pan to wake him up as soon as he dropped the sppon.

I wrote a bash script for this. Press a key on the keyboard and keep it pressed. When you fall asleep you'll release the key. But instead of waking you up instantly, it let you sleep for N minutes after the loss of keypress (also limited the total time given to the "time to fall asleep"+"sleeping time," so if you had 20 minutes for the nap, you could limit it as "sleep 10 with max 20")

Interesting -- source?

Where do you nap? Does your office provide a suitable place?

Most under-appreciated killer hiring feature.

I usually nap under the pool table that no one uses.

On my chair/desk. I reduce the chair's height so I'm not bending over too much, and put my head on my arms on the table.

i used to nap under my cubicle desk... w/ the geometry of my cube, no one could see me even if they poked their head in.

doesn't work w/ standing desks in open layouts :( now i often go to car.

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