I for one found that my productivity grew tenfold when I realized that I have the most energy and can work most consistently between 1:30 AM and 5:00 AM. Seriously.

You read about this…?

Delayed sleep phase syndrome - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Hmm. I am really interested in this idea, because I don’t often pay attention to it. I am an online educator, and find it EXCEPTIONALLY difficult to be motivated when I have all of the internet waiting to distract me. I think that for me, I noticed that I work well evrywhere BUT home…however, even that is not always true.

Perhaps there actually are good times in the day for me to work, and those just sometimes coincided with good places.

For those of you who can work remotely: Which is stronger for you? Place or time of day?

A couple of years ago, my decent into retail (a few of you out there may recall something they called the recession) found me punching the clock at 5AM, five days a week. This wasn’t a job where I’d come in and sit in the dark for a couple hours. I’d be on the floor, cracking the whip over other exhausted people. By the fifth day of this schedule, I’d be lucky if I could remember my name, let alone mange to be productive.

After about a year of this, I had my final temper tantrum: I found myself in the middle of the floor, surrounded by customers, both hands raised to the heavens, a bird fully sprouted in both hand. This turned out to be the most productive thing I could have done, since it made me decide to take a job in the back for less money. So now I play on the computers all day. (And as of last week, I finally got my IN box to empty — it only took ten months!)

This story suggests to me a possible followup to this podcast, for those of us not so lucky as to have control over the clock: “Maximizing Productivity While You’re Asleep.”

I have found that a real “deadline crunch” seems to motivate me to work. Also, I work best from 8 pm until midnight. This is when I feel energized. I have never understood those people who could easily handle a 9-5 routine. I wonder if this is a left brain/right brain thing, where creative types also view time “creatively”. Just a thought. ncnblog.com

Saw the “Oliver Sacks loves squid” link to the right and was reminded of a conversation over the summer that jumped from neuroscience to ferns to stereoscopy and back again. Someone should ask Dr. Sacks how he gets so much done and yet manages to satisfy all of his random interests—no doubt he counts squid among his hobbies too.

The reason I bring this up is that it reminded me of Dr. Seymour Benzer, widely known as the father of behavioral genetics and one of the pioneers in the genetic revolution since the 1950’s. Dr. Benzer has always considered himself somewhat nocturnal, and tends to come in to work in the afternoon, come back a few hours after dinner, and work into the morning hours. He’s probably been doing this for at least fifty years, and is a great example of the idea that it’s best to work when you feel most productive (and mornings be damned!)

Coincidentally, Dr. Benzer’s actually responsible for the discovery of the genetic basis for circadian rhythm, the approximately day-long cycle that controls when animals are active and when they sleep (and when they’re hungry, and many many other things). There’s a real biological basis for being at your best at certain times, so don’t try to fight it if you don’t have to.

By exercising one can increase endurance, strength, and efficiency which basically gives you the ability to do more work and have more “energy”. I wonder if there’s a way to do the same with one’s work energy. Are there ways of “working out” to increase your capacity over time to GTD? If I get 10 things crossed off my next actions list that’s a big day for me. My average is around 4 at work and 4 at home. Are there ways to build up my next action fitness levels and do more in the same amount of time, like how a runner builds up to doing a marathon?

[…] Merlin Mann of 43 Folders has created a podcast that echos many of the ideas I posted yesterday in Time Context Planning.  There are three possibilities for this sequence of events: […]

I think circadian rhythms are a crock. But I do think that sleep is an amazing brain-fermentation tool. I like to take a powernap (huzzah pzziz) at some point mid-day and I always notice an increase in my motivation, concentration, brilliance and boyish good looks after my mid-day slumber.

And, having done polyphasic sleep, I know that I’m able to excel on very minimal sleep — so long as I’m getting enough REM cycles during the day. That is, I can excel so long as I stay healthy, otherwise I need all the recoup time I can get. But taking advantage of the amazing power of REM to increase my brain’s organizational abilities is always a good idea. Which is why this very afternoon I shut my door, popped in my Shure e2c’s, and lay on the floor for twenty minutes of shut eye. After that, I had another two hours of peak performance before I headed home to the Chaos Lab.

I’m all for early-morning productivity, when there’s no distraction or interruption, but I’m also for getting another burst of energy and enthusiasm for a finish-line sprint.

I appreciate you adults out there acknowledging the unfairness that teenagers must submit to on a daily basis (otherwise known as school). I go to a magnet-type highschool, which is supposedly a highschooler’s best bet for getting into a good college, but very few students over the age of sixteen at my school get more than six hours of sleep a night. I myself usually get around five. Frequently, I wonder how directly hours of sleep correlate with hours of solid productivity. Or perhaps it’s that, with fewer hours of sleep, your productivity time is bound to be scattered so liberally across the day that it’s unlikely you’ll find the five minutes that you’re best able to complete a specific task.