Hacking Your Week: The 28 Hour Day
This last New Years, Andrey and I decided to try out an experiment and switched to 28 hour days: 19 hours awake, 9 hours of sleep. It turned out more difficult and more interesting than I would have anticipated, and wanted to do a quick write-up for anyone else who was willing to try it out. Andrey also wrote an introductory post at his blog.
Tips:
- Most obvious: Make sure you have an entire free week to devote to this project. I would not recommend this if you have a 9-5 day job, since during half the week you’ll be sleeping.
- Go for the 19/9 approach, instead of the 20/8. Having an extra four hours a day can actually be extremely tiring, and 9 hours of sleep will help you recuperate a little bit better.
- Make sure that you go to bed and get up at your scheduled times, regardless on how sleepy or awake you feel.
- Plan it on a week that takes advantage of the days you’ll be awake at night. Andrey and I managed to make New Years Eve the day we wake at 8pm, so we were able to run around San Francisco all night feeling rested, grab “dinner” at 8am right when my favorite breakfast spot opened, and then crashed at 1pm.
- Sidenote: Lack of sleep/odd hours can make you cranky, and it’s really odd to be cranky after waking up and it’s 8pm. Make sure your “mornings” are restful and not stressy.
- You might or might not be able to get by without naps. Yeah, an extra 4 hours of wakefulness might not seem like much, but halfway through the week it was really hard to stay awake (and the last thing you want to do is go to bed early). Don’t be afraid of a random 30 minute nap midway through the day.
- Do it with someone - a significant other or a friend. It’s more fun to be running around at night with someone and sharing your experiences.
- That said, if you have a week you need a lot of quiet time to get stuff done, sometimes working during the night can be very productive. Andrey did this on his first time.
One week of 28 hour days is a really great way to shake up your routine and try something new. I’d highly recommend it if you have the time.
It was not inspired by xkcd.
It was inspired by my regular sleeping habits at the time which I decided to formalize and extrapolate to one full loop, which happened to be one week.
The xkcd comic was a coincidence and a convenient reference for illustrative purposes.
Andrey says:
:( Sorry. Updating post…
Tracy Osborn says:
Hello Tracy and Andrey - I love the GetUpAndMove design and browsing around to learn more about who made it I found this entry. I thought I would recommend this terrific article about sleep by Piotr Wozniak, in case it is interesting:
http://www.supermemo.com/articles/sleep.htm
Gary Wolf says:
Hey Gary, thanks for commenting! GetUpandMove is getting some big tweaks too in the next few weeks, hope you like them. :)
Reading the article now!
Tracy Osborn says:
This is not as productive as what I do, I have a scedual were you stay up until 3 AM and then sleep until 9 AM, and it always works great after the first week the body doesn’t know the difference between that(6 hours sleep) and normal amounts of sleep, this could be changed to suit other schedules(IE: 1 AM to 7 AM), I am just throwing this out there…
tymaxbeta says:
When I’m coding, I know that the long stretches of wakefulness allow me to get into the zone and become very productive. I think this chart sums it up: http://chartporn.org/2010/03/17/day-in-the-life-of-a-programmer/ :)
The biggest drawback to the 28hr day would be when you need to meet in person. Unless of course you can convince everyone you work with to join your tribe ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Standard_Tribe ) .
Eric Estabrooks says:
I think 28 hours might be too much.
If you read the book “wide awake at 3 am”, the sleep researchers say your natural body clock is 25 hours. You can stretch this to +/- 2 hours without problems.
That means 23 hours to 27 hours is what you should shoot for. I think 28 hours might be too much.
and other places I’ve read… It helps to eat and/or exercise when you get up, and get big doses of sunlight or the equivalent. And in the same way, don’t eat or expose yourself to sunshine when you want to sleep.
Have fun :)
Mike says:
Interesting. This is already a habit of mine naturally. I’m working from home on my own schedule and not expending much physical energy, so I end up staying up longer.
The one drawback is trying to get things done that require me to be awake at a certain time of the day when I’m waking up at a different time every day. I like to do server backups late at night when less users are online. And, something like mowing the grass requires daylight. So, the window to get those things done becomes smaller on certain days.
The 9am - 3am (or so) schedule would be perfect for me and I’ve tried. But, I can’t seem to stick to it. I should probably exercise more.
frank says:
like it heard it from xkcd wish it worked with my schedule but your graph is off….
Austinr says:
also on the graph you guys made it to look like a 7 day graph instead of a 6 day… I recommend a 168 hour graph.
Austinr says:
[…] schedule I’m on, for those who can and want to contact me, is located here: http://www.limedaring.com/hacking-your-week-the-28-hour-day/. I picked the first blog that seemed reasonable and decided to base my efforts on that. Google sure […]
Society Must Be Defenstrated » The Week of the 28-Hour Day (Day 1) says: