The math does seem really appealing, getting 4 extra hours of sleep (assume up to 8), and planning out 2 hours of whitespace during the day (both ideas I would

The math does seem really appealing, getting 4 extra hours of sleep (assume up to 8), and planning out 2 hours of whitespace during the day (both ideas I would love to try, don't get me wrong) leaves 14 hours to work. Assume that realistically only 12 of those hours can be spent working, given you have to eat, shower, dress, socialize, general upkeep, a 60% increase in productivity gives you 19 hours of comparable effort, a potential +7 or an entire working day. Worth a shot, but there are deadline pressures which often force your hand and there are likely physical constraints which would limit the amount of increase you can legitimately experience. I.e. how fast can you type? How quickly can other people absorb the genius thought flows you are expounding? +4 seems like a fair upper bound, plus you get to feel better. I think it depends to some degree though on the type of work you are doing, but the power degradation that occurs when pushing yourself is kind of akin to going insane, you probably won't realize it is happening until you are staring at some javascript error haplessly and suddenly remember that you used to be able to summon the solution at will, or remember that you used to know that it was considered impolite to scream at random people on the street.