I remember Jason Fried from Basecamp writing and tweeting a whole lot about the importance of sleep. It was the opposite advice to what everyone else as talking about at that time. “You can always sleep later”. “If you are not burning the midnight oil, you are not working hard enough”. There were so many such pieces of advice I would come across when trying to read about startup land.
I love my sleep time and afternoon naps. But the advice on offer said that burning the midnight oil was the way to go if you are working on a startup. That feature needed to be deployed yesterday.
Jason’s words and articles he would link to did strike a chord with me. I kept reading more about how important sleep is and the side effects of not sleeping enough. I did not feel good the next day, after having burnt the midnight oil a few nights in a week. I would be exhausted on the weekends.
I started sleeping more hours and started tracking my sleep hours. Sleeping seven-plus hours indeed made me feel better and made me productive. I was not thinking about the nap as soon as I woke up. I vouched never to go back to burning the midnight oil.
That was four years ago. A lot has changed since then, and here I am today, reminding myself of the importance of sleep. I have not slept six plus hours for a few months now. Apple Watch tells me it’s between 5 and 5:30 hours. Something needs to change. A few things need to change. I will be tweaking my schedule to get at least seven plus hours of sleep from today.
