Polyphasic Sleep Schedule - Shifting Gears

During the week of Thanksgiving I took a few vacation days so that I could have nine straight days off of work. I observed, as I've noted before, that a Polyphasic Sleep Schedule is a kind of unstable equilibrium - you can stay on it, but it takes some attention and a little effort.

During my vacation I pretty much let both go completely. As a result, by the end of the week I was pretty much back to a Monophasic schedule, and didn't really feel much urge to nap during the day.

I was of course curious to see if there would be any challenge to switching back. The real question, once Monday rolled around and I was back to reality: to Polyphase, or not to Polyphase?

I chose to Polyphase, if for no other reason than to test whether the transition would be easy or hard.

Thankfully, I found it quite easy. In fact, my Noon and 5pm naps on Monday were two of the most superb 20-minute naps I think I've had in a long while... perhaps the best since the beginning of the experiment.

I do wonder whether it would have been a tougher transition had I been Monophasic for, say, a month before trying to switch back. I seem to recall that Steve Pavlina wanted to try switching back to a Polyphasic schedule, but I don't know if he ever tried.

4-Hour Workweek?

Over the past week or so I've been reading Tim Ferriss' "The 4-Hour Workweek". Though I'm not completely sold on everything Timmy has to say, I will admit that there are many thought-provoking tidbits in there...

So as I travel down the path of continuous improvement in my personal and career lives, I'm implementing the following activities as this week's experiment:

1. I've shut off my email auto send/receive function - the goal here is to check email only twice per day, thus eliminating the endless gear-changing that fragments my attention and keeps me unproductive.

2. I'm going on the low-information diet - all the blogs and B.S. that I normally fill in between major tasks during the day are put on hold until the evening, hopefully helping me get in the habit of working on my one or two "big goals" for the day until completion.

I will say that the no-email-checking thing is really hard. The upside is that I'm realizing how frequently I have been alt-tabbing over to gmail or work email just to see if there's anything there.

Additionally, at least once per day I confess I tab over to email with a specific purpose, "Gotta send these numbers to Bob..." - and when I see my inbox, there's about 5-10 emails sitting there. Of course I quickly scan them and end up seeing a couple of responses on things I've been waiting for, so I read those. Then the responses generate more questions or to-dos, so I handle that. And then... what the hell was I doing checking email again? Oh well. Must be getting senile. So I tab back over to Excel and "D'oh! Gotta send these numbers to Bob..."

If this scenario seems familiar to you, I suggest turning off your auto-receive for emails and take back one small piece of your sanity.