The New Schedule

08/03/15

Okay, with new plans and life goals sometimes comes a new time-schedule, sometimes. It's pretty normal for me when I want to change my social habits.

Which is usually why I change my sleeping habits, and thus overall schedule. If I need to see people more, I wake up later to increase overlap between social events and my waking time. When I don't need to see people very much, I prefer to wake up super early and enjoy the morning isolation.

So, lately I've been considering the value of communication with others. I started getting pretty productive when going to meetups and stuff and just engaging with what others were creating with the tools I wanted to be proficient in. I then wanted to carve out more time to do things... and ended up doing less with that time.

So, I've decided to recreate the productive energy of before and start going to meetups and stuff again. As such, I've changed my sleeping and work strategy.

Weekdays

Sleep: 2200 thru 0400 (6 hours per weekday)

Work: 0500-1130, 1330-1500 (8 hours per weekday)

Weekend

Sleep: 2200 thru 0900 (11 hours per weekend day)

Work: None. Or on an as-needed basis.

Thinking

I've already tried putting in extra hours at work for extra vacation and extra pay. I think I burned out. It may have been something else, but I want to cover the various possibilities and so to avoid burnout I'm going to just doing standard hours, with extra work only done when necessary.

I have no planned vacations coming up, so I can just let my PPTO accumulate and hope to only need that for vacation for the future.

Sleep-wise, I've tried a constant sleep schedule, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. I've heard that the average person needs about 7.5 hours of sleep per day to be properly-rested. Like calorie intake, I believe weekly numbers are probably more important than daily numbers as far as consistency is concerned. So, I'm going to try a slight undershoot of 6 hours of sleep per weekday, and make up for the deficit with 11 hours per weekend day, leading to 52 hours of sleep per week (half an hour short of 7.5*7=52.5).

A long time ago, I experimented with 6 hours of sleep per day and had surprisingly good results. I think it isn't sustainable long-term for me, however, so I'll try to make up for it with sleep-in weekends.

Back when I was losing weight via lots of exercise and calorie-counting, I got a lot out of cheat days. On these days, I ate what I felt like and I more-or-less did nothing. I'm willing to try that same idea but with sleep and general productive hobbies.

Let's see how it works out.