If I get more then 6 hours of sleep in the summer I'm sluggish all day but in the winter I need atleast 9 to make through the day.

But I don't miss College days at all when I'd get 45 min- 2 hours asleep under my computer desk because of work/school/clubs/girls

Final

It's not bragging so much as stating how dedicated you are to getting something done. Which person would you rather count on someone who puts in extra effort to get something completed. Or someone who works a flat 9-5 and will get the project done whenever it gets done.

Why is stating how well you function on little sleep supposed to be any different from saying you feel after running a 10K. It's bad on your knees and feet...

EnOne

I know that it doesn't do very well for schoolwork, that's for sure. I've just finished my exams (huzzah!) but I know the paper I spent an all-nighter on is not my best work.

I'm not so sure this applies to everything, though, and it assumes you've started your working day at 9am. If you hit your stride at around 3pm, you'll have much better productivity into the night.

TheRabbi

@EnOne: I'm sorry, but if you can't work a flat 9-5 AND get the project done on schedule, what the hell good are you?

I'm a flat 9-5er. Or, 7:45-3:45er, with no break for lunch. As it is, I still have slack time in my day. Why? Because I accomplish my tasks quickly and efficiently. Work smarter, not harder.

My boss generally agrees with my work ethic, and encourages that for the team. We get calls for off hour work, and we have to handle them- cars stop coming out of China if we don't- but then we're encouraged to make up those hours by coming in late, working from home, or leaving early.

t3knomanser

I never EVER stayed up all night cramming for test or finishing a paper. I did however stay up all night watching movies a few times and then took a sick day the next day to rest up.

My college days were pretty atypical with me working most nights until 11PM and then going home and falling asleep around 2 to wake at 9:30. Now that I have a 9-5 I still can't break from that cycle and despite now getting up at 6:30 I just can't get myself to bed at 10-11.

I don't know how the people who get in before I do can do it. My parents get up even earlier than I do!

Seriously, if I could change anything about my job I would cut my lunch hour to a half hour and start an hour later and stay a half hour later.

battra92

Unfortunately, my boss only sleeps two to three hours a night, works nine-ten hour days, and often returns late a night to work some more. He doesn't understand that some of us need sleep and prefer to have lives, only working eight hour days.Perhaps I should forward this to him. You can definitely tell it's getting to him.

handngrain

@EnOne:

The person who planned and estimated well enough to complete the project based on an 8 hour day. I wouldn't want the project filled with the sloppiness and desperation spawned from 10-12 hour days.

fredramsey

Sometimes you have to push through and do what has to be done, but people who continually brag about how they're working late every night need to reassess their priorities.

edosan

Staying up all night for work is dumb. Staying up all night because you are watching the knife show is awesome.

/honestly, 247 knives for $37.29 is just a fantastic deal.

smitty1123

I used to study under a Cognitive Psychology who worked as a Search and Rescue consultant for the army - there were strong policies for the S&R teams to ensure that they were well rested allowing proper concentration. Many studies have been done.

In short - all nighters are not the answer in the long run even though you may be able to achieve a short term goal.

fishlips20

Yeah, we have a problem with skipping sleep. Personally I find that half the time when I stay up it's not because I'm working but because I'm having fun or wasting time. The reason I stay up late is because I'm too busy to quit early, like at 6 or 7, and I feel tempted to relax for a while before bed. You'd think bed would be relaxing enough . . .

Michael @ Paperweight Blog

That should be "Monkey #2". And I got a full 8 last night!

jaxun

@lauriek:

Of course, stuff happens. However, that is acceptable once or twice. If its happening all the time, someone is to blame for poor planning/estimating.

If a project is going to take 3 weeks of 8-hour days (factoring in inevitable problems), saying you can get it done in one week is unfair to everyone- including the client.

downstairs

I function poorly without sleep. I try to keep a minimum of seven hours of sleep to feel at least decent and able to operate optimally. Any less, and I feel the effects of it (and if I sleep only seven hours for a long time, with lesser quantities here and there, it really hurts me).

I try to sleep more and wear that as a badge. In the end, I'm happier, healthier, better rested, and do work well. Plus, by needing more sleep, it forces me to learn how to work more efficiently/manage time more.

Nine/ten hours of sleep is my ideal amount.

- PR-0927

PR-0927

I think it's funny that the pic for this article shows a sleeping baby. Getting up to attend to fatherly duties for my kids was the only reason I ever suffered from sleep deprivation.

Not so bad with my first child, who was sleeping through the night by 4 months. Moneky #2, however, took 8 months to get there, and the last 3 really tore me up. Having to function at the job every day while only getting AT MOST 2 consecutive nights of sleep for weeks on end definitely took its toll. I was a wreck.

jaxun

@lauriek: So why should the employee at the bottom of the totem pole get stuck working late because the manager or vendor screwed up? t3knomaster still makes a good point: working smarter accomplishes much more than working harder ever can.

Rhayader

We have somebody here, a young guy, who likes to pull all-nighters. It's not unusual to see code checkins from him at 7 AM... buggy, broken code. Then he misses meetings, and takes 5 times longer to get anything done than I ever do.

Crashproof

@lauriek: Sometimes buildings burn down. So?

We're not talking about worst case scenarios. We're talking average case. I know people who routinely put in sixty hour weeks. They act like this makes them committed. In reality, it makes them look like they're incompetent- why do they need that extra time to get their work done?

Yes, sometimes bad things happen. Those are exceptional situations, and hence- would be considered exceptions.

t3knomanser

Count me in on the work smarter not harder ethic. I used to be a "work 12 hour days and brag about it" person. But I realized that this was just plain stupid.

Anyone can work hard. Working smart and efficient, that's a much more difficult and rare skill- something I finally figured out.

From here on out I insist on 8 hour days. However, in trade for that, I bet I get more work done than a guy who works 12-hour days.

downstairs

A guy I work with loves to be online and sending emails late at night. Often I will get basically useless emails from him that were clearly sent only to prove he was working late.

This macho "I work all the time" attitude is a bunch of BS, if you ask me. The human brain needs rest and variety to stay sharp and effective. I can get nearly twice as much done in 80 hours spread over two weeks as I can in 80 hours spread over a single week. Creativity and problem solving skills are much more important to finishing a job quickly and correctly than the willingness to work constantly.

Rhayader

t3knomanser, that's a fairly stupid and unkind sentiment. Sometimes projects get behind due to the fault of either your managers or third parties over which you have no control.

lauriek

Should tell that to all the attending physicians in surgery! Sleep deprivation is normal operating conditions for residents.

cavalierex

@fredramsey:

Agreed.

That's one of the things I took away from GTD; when a potential project or task appears on your radar, make note of it so it doesn't take you by surprise later.

Sure, there are things that will crop up at the last minute that require extra effort and long hours. But obvious "must have" sections of the project should not be one of them.

One day I got a request to write some updated product pages for our website the same day the product was being released. Even though it was a fairly simple task that only took an hour or two, waiting until the last minute meant that instead of taking some time to do it right on one of the any number of days that I had the extra time, I had to drop what I was working on to crank them out.

Jay Elmore

Silicon valley startups ARE notorious for encouraging sleep deprivation as some weird part of the team culture. Been there, done that - but after having two kids, and going through THAT sleep deprivation, I value a full night's sleep more than anything else (almost) and hopefully will NOT go that route, ever again.

vered

Truth be told a new baby, a start-up business, and just trying to live leaves little time for sleep.... uninterupted sleep anyway.

Lately I have been getting something like 5 to 6 hours of broken sleep (gotta feed the baby) and to be honest, i feel wrecked almost all the time! Even writing this comment is taking alot more effort then it should...

cmherskovic

Well, studies show that you generally accomplish as much in 6 hours as you do in 8 (due to the last two hours being wasted because of you being less efficient if you have to work longer), plus you are happpier on a shorter work week and your company obviously get the same out of it. I wish this world was not run by economists who equate longer hours with more work getting done.

Monsterdog

I've long been a night owl and was amazed when a friend of mine was actually getting really shamed over being one! Led to me doing a lot of research on Night Owls. Found out they even found a gene for it.

I was pretty surprised when I saw Bill Clinton speak last year and he was talking about the biggest issues facing the crisis and seriously said sleep deprivation is a big public health problem.

SystemsThinker

Pulling an all-nighter or working long hours is a good skill to have when you need to use it.

But I agree it's a bad idea on a chronic basis.

wonkydonky

I can tell you from experience the body learns to adjust. I had a baby 6 months ago and my average sleep time went from 8 hours to 5. Sometimes 6 or 7 but mostly 5 - 5 1/2. In the beginning I could not even function having to drink 3 extra cups of coffee a day.

But now 5 months later I have no problem functioning like I did before... Will I burn out? Will there be long term consequences? Will I spontaneously combust?

I hope not!

AskTheAdmin

I laugh when people brag or talk about having to pull an all-nighter to get work done. Typically, what this tells me is someone cannot manage their time efficiently, or cannot manage to mitigate distractions throughout their day. I've done a handful of those all night proposals or projects, and find that usually in the late hours, you are dosing off, unproductive, or commiserating with a colleague.

ayeroof

I am a short sleeper. Sleeping for 6 hours or so is enough. I usually spring out of bed before my alarm goes off. With a little scheduling I keep my days well weighted to allow enough work to stay active but not over burdened.

Sometimes I hit that creative wall or need some downtime. In those instances I do something else like ride my bike or completely clean my apartment.

My employer is also pretty good about time off. My video comrade here at the office was extremely busy for about a month straight. My boss noticed and told him to go, take a few days to a week away from it all.

rident

Momentarily disregarding the ongoing work-longer vs work-smarter debate, working through sleep deprivation can be plenty productive if you place the right activities at the right time.

If I know I'm in for a tough couple of days from any combination of school, work, or personal projects, I always frontload four things that need an awakened attention to detail: planning, creative work, potentially dangerous work, and communication. I make sure to leave most of my low-brain work like notating, data analysis, and general physical work horsing for when my brains kicks down to basics-only mode.

Once in a while, I'll go back to creative tasks when I'm in a total stupor. It's sort of a creative gamble, sometimes genius strikes at the tail end of a 36 hours stretch as you start to doze off and your sensibilities can't keep it at bay.

Basically, I try to do most of the work that requires mental acuity ahead of time. When I come to something I know I can do with half my brain off I stick an arrow to it and leave it for when my brain is half off. I've come to think of the arrows as breadcrumb-tasks.

It sucks when you have to pull multi-day benders, and I'll agree that no one should have to. But not having to doesn't mean not being prepared and able.

mauselous

Chronic sleep deprivation also leads to weight gain.

quail

If you are so bad at estimating that you have to work marathons you need to take classes on how to tell management real estimates.

work smart not hard. You dont get promoted by working your brains out.

timgray

Yeah, I (and friends as well) used to brag about it. Not as a mark of how hard we work or how dedicated we are, but as a mark of how much shit we're going through; you know, kinda like battle scars, except sleep deprivation (usually) leaves non-permanent effects.

Not anymore though. Now I just sleep when I'm tired. That usually occurs past 2am though.

kureshii

Interesting to know that sleep deprivation studies at Walter Reed hospital have shown that people at 20 hours of continual wakefulness are performing at the level they would be if they were legally drunk (and probably a lot less happier).

People asked to do a simple task with only 3 hours of rest a night for 7 nights were down to 55% of their normal level. After 3 nights of uninterrupted sleep, they only managed to get back to 80% of their normal levels.

andykay

@SystemsThinker: Hearing that from bill clinton is surprising, given how little sleep he supposedly gets. (If I remember correctly, 4 hours/night)

Davidmanheim

@cavalierex: @: That's actually something that's been proven in studies in hospitals, and identified as a problem within our health-care system. We don't have enough health-care professionals, so they have to work more hours...and then the quality of care goes down and it bites us in the butt.

Sort of sucky, isn't it?

theninthcloud

As a high school teacher, I know that many, many of my college-bound students seem to think it's cool to pull an all-nighter for an exam, a paper, or whatever. Typically, they have had weeks to prepare a particular assignment, yet they wait until the very last minute. I try to tell them that a few of them might be able to do quality work at the last minute, or without much sleep, but the vast majority suffer for it. They never listen. :)

SkinnerBox

@Rhayader: The problem then is you get managers who see that guy working late at night and assume that means they work harder. Which is annoying. If Jimbo takes half again as much time as I do to accomplish the same thing, who is really the better worker.

Numerous

I work with devs, who are notorious for this attitude. Here's what I've noticed:

1. Late night is wonky. Full of errors, light on documentation. It makes more work for everyone else.
2. Late nights become an excuse for missed meetings. Meetings are not always a waste of time... especially if it was your meeting.
3. You are not always just there to be a code monkey. You are also there to be an asset to the team. You can't do that if you're sleeping off an all night bender and don't come in until 3. A two hour window of face to face or IM to IM time does not do.

MrsIrB

In an article i read recently, it says (rightly) how people think it's kind of cool and manly to stay up late into the night, but what's really manly, is actually waking up at 5am in the morning every day.

Try sleeping/waking with the sun. Now that's a badge i'd like to wear.

Gravyman

@EnOne:
This is not an attack on you, but if one is truly dedicated to a job, then one would have gotten it done already rather than putting it off to the last minute and having to stay up all night to complete the task.

People who procrastinate and have to sacrifice their health and sanity as a result are usually lazy people who need a way to excuse their sloth. Instead of admitting that they are unreliable and frivolous, they attempt to save face by making other people--those who have nothing to do because they did it all--look lazy.

My 8 hours of sleep at night is my reward for getting the job done. The Land of Nod is for closers.

elgilicious

My time is generally managed reasonably, but two days ago I was asked, at the last minute, to get something done that cannot be physically done without spending a night or two at work.

I don't mind having to do the long hours if it is my fault - then I'm punishing myself for my lack of foresight, but in this case, there was nothing I could do about it.

And before someone says something about efficiency, I work in a lab, a good chunk of this time is waiting for cells to grow, reactions to happen or liquids to dialyse. You can't make them go faster.

sciencegeek

@cavalierex:

There is this strange view that residents should go without sleep for long periods of time as some sort of initiation into the medical profession...the attending physicians did it when they were residents, the logic goes, so the residents should do it now. The hospitals, of course, want to squeeze as much work for as little money as possible.

It's unfortunate, because that's how serious mistakes happen. But I'm not sure the attending physicians are the ones who will change it.

[Shifting gears to the world outside the hospital...]

Working sleep deprived is of course horribly inefficient, error-prone, and generally a bad way to live, in my opinion. Having said that, I have occasionally found it useful to engage in occasional high-profile late-night work stuff in order to score political points with a clueless boss. Make sure your late night is a matter of record, do it only when it will score real "team player" points (such as for a production push when the other "team players" are also doing it), and do it as infrequently as possible.

It's dumb, it's cynical, but it can make a difference in your boss's perception of you if you use it occasionally and judiciously. If you have to do it all the time, however, it migh be worthwhile to spend some of those late nights on Monster.com or Dice.com instead.

not2techy

I think it's an extremely bad habit!
I can't stand my peers at school bragging about it everyday! Yeah they might be in the top rank - but I find it very pathetic when it becomes a daily thing.

It all comes down to manging your time. Most of these people purposely start the work late and then brag about it to others thinking it makes them....cool?

I'm a developer who runs an interactive marketing firm - I've had shit load of projects to deal with (not to mention school work), but was able to manage them all during the day. Didn't need any all nighters at all.

Sleep deprivation will affect these fellas later on in their life. It's a habit which they'll have trouble leaving in the future, especially if they don't try to work on it now.

deleet

Sometimes, you need to pull an all-nighter. But "sometimes" should NOT turn into "every night a week". This apt cartoon makes it clear:

» [www.phdcomics.com]

Torley

What a coincidence! Tonight is the night I have to stay up all night to finish a paper.... one that I waited the last minute to start and it's due tomorrow.

sam123boo

@gravyman "Try sleeping/waking with the sun. Now that's a badge i'd like to wear."

This is totally unfair. A lot of people "pull all-nighters" *NOT* because they want to work extra hours, but because they work better at night!

I "pull all-nighters," all the time, as do many others I know ... but we don't work 9-5. I try to sleep the same 6-8 hours as everyone, I just happen to enjoy working from about 9 PM to 5 AM (instead of vice versa)

DHH is right that sleep deprivation is not a badge of honor, as Steve Jobs would maybe have us believe. I just want to make the point that some bosses impose ridiculous hours that conflict with many developers' and designers' natural sleep cycles (I don't know why such cycles seem more prevalent in developers and designers, they just seem to) and, because people work better at night, they tend to stay up thru the night.

Many, many, many, many, many highly successful people work weird hours. They key is to stay organized and don't lose any sleep.

I'm sick and tired of people saying that all highly organized people wake up at 5am. Anyone who knows anything about the brain and circadian rhythm knows that sleep cycles vary _greatly_ and some highly functional peoples' natural cycles have them waking up in the early afternoon. Our culture associates waking up late with laziness and that's simply not true.

At my office, we work with everyone's sleep schedules and don't force people to be at the office when they're not alert or ready to be awake. We have 3 kinds of schedules:
* The early risers get to work around 6:30/7 and work til 3:30/5
* The early morning-ish risers get to work around 10-11PM
* The early afternooners get to work around 2-3:30PM

Our only rule is that everyone's schedules need to overlap for atleast an hour or so. There should be sometime during the day when everyone is there so you can talk to people you need to. Our early risers love getting work done in the quiet early hours, our early morning-ish risers love being around lots of people and collaborating with everyone, and our early afternooners long for the later hours when they can get work done. We literally have days when 'the graveyard shift' is leaving after the morning people get to work.

I *LOVE* working at night. I find that I'm _so_ much more productive. My perfect sleep cycle has me sleeping around 5/7am - 1/3pm.

As elgilicious said, "the Land of Nod is for closers" and I highly enjoy feeling good about sleeping thru mornings after a nice, long and productive night of sleep.

Everyone b*ching and moaning about how developers turn in bad code while coding at night and they need to be an asset to the team, etc ... get better developers! There are highly successful development teams that have developers all over the world working in tons of different time zones.

My boss lets me work at night because I get shit done. We've got a number of contract designers who also work funny hours ... so long as you get shit done, who cares that you happen to prefer different hours?

Late hours != Sleep deprivation

Anyone else highly enjoy being nocturnal?

</really-long-rant>

remi

@Davidmanheim: Clinton said that almost every mistake he made in politics happened when he was short on sleep. I guess he should have taken a lot more naps during this campaign for Hillary.

SystemsThinker

@Davidmanheim: Hearing that from bill clinton is surprising, given how little sleep he supposedly gets. (If I remember correctly, 4 hours/night)

Well to be fair, the rest of the hours he's out cruising for fat women.

battra92