As I described before, this second week of being polyphasic will focus on more rigor.
The plan is simple: each cycle must contain something to keep me active, excited, and royally pissed that it must be interrupted by biological maintenance.
23:00 - 3:00 Lojban. At 4 hours a day or 2 full pomodoro cycles, this is plenty of time to become fluent quickly.
3:00 - 7:00 Reading. When do you get a chance to read for 4 hours, uninterrupted?
7:00 - 11:00 Coding. I figure that this is my problem cycle, and the best solution is to be doing something that punishes me for illogic and mistakes, rewards me for clear thinking, and, best of all, trains me in the vital art of prioritizing. If something is taking more than 4 hours to code, I am doing something wrong. Either I need to read up on things, discover a better design, or rethink the current design. This should be a great way of both keeping me occupied, and teaching me how to program effectively.
11:00 - 14:00 General studying. The emphasis here is on fluffless reading. This is the time to follow up on documentation I didn't have time for during my coding cycle, textbooks, tutorials, etc. Again, this is a task that punishes mistakes and fuzzy thinking, while rewarding clarity and logic; falling toward the end of my problem cycle it should be very useful.
14:00 - 22:00 Work.
22:00 - 23:00 Anything else I didn't get to.
While I don't expect to be able to rigorously isolate each cycle, the emphasis on a single mindset in each cycle should be easy to follow. I hope this will both keep me occupied, and have a side-effect of dropping me into the proper mindset.
Showing posts with label projects. Show all posts
Showing posts with label projects. Show all posts
Friday, June 11, 2010
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
Light anomie, brainfart on polyphasic resources
I feel off today. Not sleepy, not bored, just a bit apathetic.
Around 2 p.m. and right now, I could feel a vague desire to nap, but I know it's just a decoy. Maybe I'll nap at 11 p.m.
I don't know if this morning was a quirk, caused by my schedule yesterday, or something ingrained in my sleep center. I think the former, given my ability to do things between the naps. Maybe I just didn't have enough to do.
The adjustment phase usually continues for 2 weeks, so I should be able to continue tweaking things and noticing the effects of changes I make.
Perhaps the biggest obstacle to entering a polyphasic schedule is that there is no bug database. There is damned little documentation. When I install Arch, I can look up the most esoteric bugs, find people submitting patches for tiny quirks, submit my own bug reports, and browse seemingly endless guides on getting things set up right. Yet for hacking the human operating system, there is no analogous source. I can't look up a central place to find out the statistically most probable effects of doing X, Y, and Z, followed by precise advice on minimizing those effects.
Normally in this case a wiki would be the solution. But there is already a polyphasic wiki, and that seems to contain little data and links to long-dead blogs.
Well. If there's no FogBugz or Github for polyphasic sleep, I guess I'll have to hack one of my own.
The features should be simple:
1. Projects. It should be easy to submit your own announcement of entering polyphasic sleep, with links to your blog and the resources you are following.
2 Forking. Users should be able to fork existing projects. Bob Foo might really like the way Jane Bar is trying polyphasic sleep, so he should be able to easily fork her attempt and submit the diffs.
3. Bug database. Users should be able to submit replicable steps for producing bugs. No "I couldn't take a nap on schedule," but instead a list of activities they did prior to the bug, the details of the project they're following, etc. When I experience a bug in Xorg, I can instantly find out other users experiencing my exact same bug. This should also be possible for polyphasic sleep.
4. Community incentives. Badges, karma, voting, collaborative wiki howto's, irc channels, etc. Anything but the current state of affairs, which is a few uncoordinated sites with little concrete information and a Freenode channel seemingly tacked on. If it works for getting people to commit frequently, getting people to offer quality advice, and for getting people to filter informative hacker news, it will definitely work for establishing a committed community of polyphasers.
I'm thinking of thus forking Tricycle's Less Wrong repo as the best platform for this. It has everything needed except for an integrated bug database, which can be hacked out of the community wiki framework.
Around 2 p.m. and right now, I could feel a vague desire to nap, but I know it's just a decoy. Maybe I'll nap at 11 p.m.
I don't know if this morning was a quirk, caused by my schedule yesterday, or something ingrained in my sleep center. I think the former, given my ability to do things between the naps. Maybe I just didn't have enough to do.
The adjustment phase usually continues for 2 weeks, so I should be able to continue tweaking things and noticing the effects of changes I make.
Perhaps the biggest obstacle to entering a polyphasic schedule is that there is no bug database. There is damned little documentation. When I install Arch, I can look up the most esoteric bugs, find people submitting patches for tiny quirks, submit my own bug reports, and browse seemingly endless guides on getting things set up right. Yet for hacking the human operating system, there is no analogous source. I can't look up a central place to find out the statistically most probable effects of doing X, Y, and Z, followed by precise advice on minimizing those effects.
Normally in this case a wiki would be the solution. But there is already a polyphasic wiki, and that seems to contain little data and links to long-dead blogs.
Well. If there's no FogBugz or Github for polyphasic sleep, I guess I'll have to hack one of my own.
The features should be simple:
1. Projects. It should be easy to submit your own announcement of entering polyphasic sleep, with links to your blog and the resources you are following.
2 Forking. Users should be able to fork existing projects. Bob Foo might really like the way Jane Bar is trying polyphasic sleep, so he should be able to easily fork her attempt and submit the diffs.
3. Bug database. Users should be able to submit replicable steps for producing bugs. No "I couldn't take a nap on schedule," but instead a list of activities they did prior to the bug, the details of the project they're following, etc. When I experience a bug in Xorg, I can instantly find out other users experiencing my exact same bug. This should also be possible for polyphasic sleep.
4. Community incentives. Badges, karma, voting, collaborative wiki howto's, irc channels, etc. Anything but the current state of affairs, which is a few uncoordinated sites with little concrete information and a Freenode channel seemingly tacked on. If it works for getting people to commit frequently, getting people to offer quality advice, and for getting people to filter informative hacker news, it will definitely work for establishing a committed community of polyphasers.
I'm thinking of thus forking Tricycle's Less Wrong repo as the best platform for this. It has everything needed except for an integrated bug database, which can be hacked out of the community wiki framework.
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
Preparing for equihexaphasic polyphasic sleep: Day 0
After deciding which nap intervals will fit most easily into work, I set my alarms.
I probably won't be sleepy til 3am or 7 am tomorrow, and it's a bit after 1pm now.
At 7 and 11 am, I laid on my couch and failed utterly at sleeping. I'll keep doing this at the appointed times until I successfully pass out.
Allow me to explain my current sleep cycle, which has worked me well for years. I have no idea what it would be called.
I currently go between 24 and 48 hours without sleep, then begin taking 3-hour catnaps each day until I have a day off, on which I make up my sleep debt after about 8 hours of sleep. I find these cat naps utterly necessary to keep my sleep cycle from drifting into the danger zone of complete non-overlap with the rest of the world; they're like tiny nudges on a steering wheel. After a 3 hour catnap, I can go another 24-48 hours without sleep if I want to. On an average week, I will often have a few days-long stretches of complete wakefulness, a catnap or two to keep my sleep-debt from smashing me into the wall at an inconvenient time, and a day off wasted by restoring my sleep-debt and syncing for the next week.
It works if I'm not conking out at work, can spend more time awake, and doesn't drive me insane.
This sleep schedule has worked well. It doesn't break, leading to awkwardness like suddenly flipping to a nocturnal schedule. It adds levity to the world by slowly decreasing my lucidity and internal censors. It decreases my shyness by the previous means as well. And most importantly, it allows me to completely baffle people I know online, as I obey no timezone other than the one in my head.
I probably won't be sleepy til 3am or 7 am tomorrow, and it's a bit after 1pm now.
At 7 and 11 am, I laid on my couch and failed utterly at sleeping. I'll keep doing this at the appointed times until I successfully pass out.
Allow me to explain my current sleep cycle, which has worked me well for years. I have no idea what it would be called.
I currently go between 24 and 48 hours without sleep, then begin taking 3-hour catnaps each day until I have a day off, on which I make up my sleep debt after about 8 hours of sleep. I find these cat naps utterly necessary to keep my sleep cycle from drifting into the danger zone of complete non-overlap with the rest of the world; they're like tiny nudges on a steering wheel. After a 3 hour catnap, I can go another 24-48 hours without sleep if I want to. On an average week, I will often have a few days-long stretches of complete wakefulness, a catnap or two to keep my sleep-debt from smashing me into the wall at an inconvenient time, and a day off wasted by restoring my sleep-debt and syncing for the next week.
It works if I'm not conking out at work, can spend more time awake, and doesn't drive me insane.
This sleep schedule has worked well. It doesn't break, leading to awkwardness like suddenly flipping to a nocturnal schedule. It adds levity to the world by slowly decreasing my lucidity and internal censors. It decreases my shyness by the previous means as well. And most importantly, it allows me to completely baffle people I know online, as I obey no timezone other than the one in my head.
Polyphasic Sleep Experiment
Oscar at Freestyle Mind listed polyphasic sleep as a personal challenge few would accept.
Well, I already subsist on little sleep, and spent many summers during my teenage years completely ruining my sleep cycle with experiments. I'll take up this challenge.
I'll try out the Uberman cycle for a month. I'll use the preparation guide at Everything2, and will spend some time on the plentiful irc channels dedicated to this craziness.
I have a feeling, though, that I will end up like this:
But everyone who knows me says I am already Kramerish.
I set my cellphone alarm for 3:20 a.m., 7:20 a.m., etc.
Let's see how this descent into insanity works out.
Well, I already subsist on little sleep, and spent many summers during my teenage years completely ruining my sleep cycle with experiments. I'll take up this challenge.
I'll try out the Uberman cycle for a month. I'll use the preparation guide at Everything2, and will spend some time on the plentiful irc channels dedicated to this craziness.
I have a feeling, though, that I will end up like this:
But everyone who knows me says I am already Kramerish.
I set my cellphone alarm for 3:20 a.m., 7:20 a.m., etc.
Let's see how this descent into insanity works out.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
