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Using Unusual Means to Increase Your Available Free Time There are many means that are professed to increase your productive and useful time in a day. Firstly, of course, is simply being better organized. Okay, may not simply. There are books, seminars, workshops, courses (online and offline) available to help increase time management. I’ll write about that later. It’s certainly something that I use in my life, including daily scheduling right down to each 15 minute block in my day. I am probably more productive than 98% of the population, and often get people asking how I manage to do so much in a day. It’s simply time management. I do have another issue in my life, though. I have a sleep disorder. For some reason I am always tired. It’s been this way as long as I can remember. And I can fall asleep at the drop of a hat. Well, almost. And it doesn’t seem to matter how much sleep I get, I am still tired. There is only one time in my life that I remember this not being the case. When I was in university, I actually functioned on about five to six hours a day – probably closer to six – for about a year. I did it without planning. I also took naps during the day, usually two naps each day. One nap was in the middle of the day, the other was in early evening. And at night I slept about 4 hours. At that time I was rarely tired. I never thought about this until I started reading about polyphasic sleep. I stumbled on it quite by accident – I’m not even sure I remember how I found the information. But I’m glad I did. Now, time management is a wonderful thing, and I fully intend to keep my time management skills at top notch and not let any of that slide. But I am also going to start an experiment in polyphasic sleep in order to see if that will help with me being tired all the time. I am going to start on Monday, August 3rd. Yes, a strange time to start, but I figure that the worst part of the phase in will be the day numbers five to nine. And the first of those will land on the weekend, so that will help a lot! Then, once I’m past the zombified stage (like jet lag, changing your sleep patterns often makes a person sleepy and lethargic until the new pattern is established), I hope that it will actually help my long term sleep and level of exhaustion.
The advantage of this, besides the hoped for better health and sleep, is that I will gain a considerable amount of time. I eventually hope to move to the model that Leonardo Da Vinci used, which is 15 minutes every four hours. That means he was only sleeping one-and-a-half hours in every day. That’s 22.5 hours of waking time! No wonder he was so productive. I, however, will not be jumping straight into that. I plan on doing this in phases, three to be exact. The first phase I will go down to four hours of sleep per day, giving me 20 hours of waking time. The second phase is 30 minutes every six hours. The models are shown below. The schedules chosen for these are done in order to accommodate my office schedule. I have a break at lunch, so that gives me time for the first 30 minute break. And the office hours end at 5pm, so that I can easily just crash for 30 minutes immediately thereafter. No, I will not be going home for those 2 naps! I am looking forward to seeing if I can manage this. There are a lot of things that I intend to do with the extra time, including more work on my online writing, some other writing, and getting a lot of things done around the house that I have been putting off for months. Follow me along here by visiting often. Here are some more resources on polyphasic sleep: - Sleep Warrior (all kinds of things on sleep)
- Facts and Myths (an article that attacks polyphasic sleep)
- an Attack on Polyphasic Sleep (a rebutal to the above article - mostly points out the illogic in the above article)
- Powerful Sleep (sells an eBook on this topic - download the first 2 chapters here. And if you like it, please come back and use my link. Yes, there is a small commission I get if you buy the book.)
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Self Growth 