Monday power quote:

Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of.”
~ Benjamin Franklin

Old Ben had it right.  Time.  It goes by so fast (geez, another year nearly at an end?), and there’s so little of it (especially compared to my to-do list)!  Life has a limited number of hours, and we choose how we use them.

I think about that whenever I see people veg out watching TV for hours every day.  I feel like somebody needs to remind them “Your life is going by, and you’ll never get those hours back again!  Is this really how you want to spend the time of your life?”  Then I think I shouldn’t be so judgmental, everybody lives life their own way.  But it still seems a crying shame.

Anyway, back to the time / to-do imbalance…  I’ve got a lot to get done before my next trip, so decided to do polyphasic sleep (short blocks of sleep, spread throughout the day) to put more hours in my day.

Buckminster Fuller termed this Dymaxion Sleep (see Time Magazine, 1943).  Fuller said 2 hrs sleep was plenty, as long as you spread it out over the day.  Other frequently cited polyphasic sleepers are Leonardo da Vinci, and good old Ben Franklin!

I experimented with this about a year ago, and found some interesting things…

-  Night & day start to become meaningless.  You’re just as likely to be doing any given thing at any time.  Some time blocks are just darker than others!

-  Life needs new rules. When you sleep 6 times/day, do you still brush & floss before bed & when you get up?  You might become a dental poster child, but think how fast you’d wear out the toothbrushes!  When do you exercise, shower, eat dinner?  And when’s cocktail time? 

-  When I had 6 naps of 30-40 min, the system seemed pretty stable (3-4 hrs sleep/day).  I was able to get a lot done, and felt good most of the time.  My level of energy was in line with what it is on a “regular schedule”.

-  When I had 6 naps of 20-30 min, the system was more fragile (2-3 hrs sleep/day).  It worked OK if I stuck to it exactly, but when something happened to interfere (conference call goes too long, dinner out doesn’t fit your window quite right, etc.), I would get so tired I’d crash and burn.

-  At those crash times, the line between waking and sleeping seemed to blur.  One time, I read over something I’d just typed, and realized that it had no bearing in reality.  I had just typed my dream! Weird!

- I get a lot done in the middle of the night! There’s something very cool about looking around at 6am, and seeing how much you accomplished while the world was asleep! This is the biggie, and why I’m back on the system now.

Right now, I’m doing a 40-min nap, 6 times a day. After a few days, it’s going well.  I’m getting a lot more done, which is just what I needed.

I couldn’t ever switch to this schedule permanently, since it doesn’t fit well with the real world and my job.  “You guys carry on down the trail, I’ve got to stop for my nap“.  Don’t think so!  But for occasional bursts of work, when extra hours are worth their weight in gold (?), I love having this as an option.

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I’m cramming right now to get everything ready for our Patagonia trip and our Belize trip, before I leave for our Santa Fe trip. It’s all very cool stuff, and I love it to pieces — just a lot to get done! Here’s to napping!