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One thing that having a kid taught me is that sleep deprivation really hurts my productivity as a programmer. It may be that some people can sleep 5 hours and

One thing that having a kid taught me is that sleep deprivation really hurts my productivity as a programmer. It may be that some people can sleep 5 hours and function just fine, I'm not going to say everybody needs the same amount of sleep. But when it comes to work ridiculous hours I've yet to see someone regularly claiming 100 hours work weeks outperform me over any length of time. If I can get in the zone and achieve peak productivity for 8 hours that is an extremely successful day. If I do that and then get 16 hours of exercise, healthy eating, and sleep then the next day I'll have made more progress in my unconscious and hit a positive feedback loop where elegant solutions to difficult problems present themselves effortlessly. Contrast to my youth where I'd regularly "work" 12-16 hour days. Then I had the mentality that 5pm is a half-day, so if progress wasn't great by then I still had another 7 hours! This can lead to a negative feedback loop where you spend more hours trying to compensate for poor performance earlier. I'm not claiming this as a universal truth, some people probably have greater capacity than me, but I know how easy it is to fool oneself.

monochr 13y ago
>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".
- watwut 13y ago
  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.
  - monochr 13y ago
    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/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1739867/
    - enoch_r 13y ago
      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/SB10001424052748703712504576242701752957910 http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405274870371250...
      - monochr 13y ago
        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.
- elorant 13y ago
  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.
- kamaal 13y ago
  >>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.
  - danielbarla 13y ago
    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.
    - kamaal 13y ago
      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.
- zhte415 13y ago
  > 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.
donniezazen 13y ago
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.
eshvk 13y ago
> 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.
rayiner 13y ago
About 1-3% of the population needs 5 hours or less of sleep: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052748703712504576242701752957910 http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405274870371250....

monochr 13y ago

>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".

watwut 13y ago
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.
- monochr 13y ago
  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/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1739867/
  - enoch_r 13y ago
    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/SB10001424052748703712504576242701752957910 http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405274870371250...
    - monochr 13y ago
      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.
elorant 13y ago
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.
kamaal 13y ago
>>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.
- danielbarla 13y ago
  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.
  - kamaal 13y ago
    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.
zhte415 13y ago
> 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.

donniezazen 13y ago

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.

eshvk 13y ago

> 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.

rayiner 13y ago

About 1-3% of the population needs 5 hours or less of sleep: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052748703712504576242701752957910 http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405274870371250....