Creating Time? ⇒

I read an interesting article a few days ago about creating personal time by changing one's sleep to polyphasic. Instead of one big sleep during the night, you have a smaller block of sleep and then scheduled naps throughout the day. The theory is that after a few days, your body adjusts and drops into REM sleep during the short (30 min) naps, so you don't miss out on any deep sleep.

Many people have tried this and those that persisted reported that they ended up with more time and had no obvious adverse affects. However there are several issues that are worth noting:

• there is no research on the long-term effects of sleeping like this
• it may be more difficult to recover from athletic endeavours

I have recently felt like I don't have enough time to get things done so I thought I'd try this for a month to see if it works for me. If I only spend my waking time struggling to stay awake, then this doesn't make sense. But if, like others have reported, I feel alert and able to get things done, I will persist. I am going to create a big list of things to do to keep myself occupied while I am adjusting to this new schedule. Once I am adjusted (hopefully), I plan to use my "extra" time to help keep the house maintained, prepare food for the coming week, do some reading and learning and exercise.

Today is day one for me. I attempted naps at 2pm and 9pm, but only managed to doze. My plan is to sleep from 1am to 5am, then nap at 9am, 1pm, 5pm and 9pm. Apparently it takes a few days before my body will adjust, so if you see a zombie that looks like me, please be nice. It will be interesting to see if this is feasible for our lifestyle and I will report back on my progress.