Fascinating. I would love to see my breakdown of bugs-per-commit, or words-spoken-in-meetings, compared to sleep to see if there any correlations. Anecdotally, sleep seems to be the number one factor that influences my productivity. More so than diet, exercise, or even mental health.
I remember when played a lot of DotA 2, trying to climb the ranks. < 6.5 hours of sleep == significantly more bad plays I wouldn't have made otherwise: forgetting about some important aspect, mistiming an action or reacting too slow. It was a level where I was often matched with competitive players and one mistake often changed the result of the game. In hindsight, I would've been better off just stopping for the day the moment I noticed my performance is garbage, but well, the game was addictive. It was almost always a bad decision to keep playing, but again, I was prone to making bad decisions on such days.
I have chronic insomnia that got worse every year. Eventually I stopped being able to sleep without being absolutely exhausted, usually after 35h or more awake hours. Almost drove me crazy. Paranoia, auditory and visual hallucinations, extreme touch sensitivity, you name it.
Lucky, modern medicine pretty much saved my life. (trazodone, which was combined with mirtazapine a few years later.)
I later was diagnosed with ADHD, and after medication I find it a bit easier to sleep (although I still need the other to have consistent sleep). Biggest problem was my brain just wouldn't shut up (and got noiser and noiser the longer I was awake.)
It took me a long time to get there, but I finally accepted that when I am tired, I shouldn't work. I should rest. The quality of the work that I do when tired is abysmal, and usually requires that it be redone anyway.
For low-latency work more sleep = better. There's no real advantage to pushing long hours. You can sleep and make quick progress when fresh.
For high-latency work that "should" be low-latency (ie you are on the end of a 1 hour pipeline that in an ideal world would be much faster) there can be significant advantages to just pushing more hours. This is a depressingly large % of enterprise work. Basically doing low brain stuff (which is most dev work) but trying to get feedback from the end of a long ci pipeline. I'm not sure this is true "in principle" but my observation is that after you hit baseline competence the people who make the most forward progress in this kind of dysfunctional scenario are the people who just spin the pipeline more and put in more hours.
For writing / proper design / activities where there might be no real safety net and feedback cycle might be years, definitely do that in the morning after good sleep.
BF Skinner, entry in one of his notebooks (as cited in “A Matter of Consequences”):
> Some way of controlling the strength of my own behavior. How to stop work before the optimal condition fades? This might be automatic if it were not for leftover compulsive effects of aversive control. Exhaust- ing avocations are a danger. No more chess. No more bridge problems. No more detective stories. When I am not working, I must relax—not work at something else! A good measure of fatigue would be helpful. I can tell how tired I am when playing the piano. Early in the morning, well rested, I surprise myself. Later in the day, I accept my errors as inevitable. My handwriting is also a gauge. It would be nice to have a shibboleth—a passage to be written in ten seconds, the errors to determine whether I work or relax. ... I must keep busy? Then relax profitably.
It's annoying that there's no easy way to export data from the Apple Watch. The only option is to export complete data from the Apple Health app, which results in a large ZIP file. This file takes about 10 minutes of preprocessing before the whole archive becomes available. It would be much better if I could export only the new records, like those from the last day.
I believe most of us sleep fewer than 3 times per day, so writing down times and doing a few subtractions and a little data entry once a week should be under 1 min/day to have everything digitised. (that said, https://xkcd.com/1205/ suggests it'd be worth spending up to 21 hours to fully automate)
It's not quite what you're asking for, but you can retrieve heath records using a Shortcut. I'm not sure if detailed sleep data is retrievable this way, but you at least can get times to bed, times woken up, etc.
We work in the sleep space, and I was having a discussion about insomnia with relative stranger.
He also has insomnia and we were discussing how it is often spoken of as an issue with anxiety, but we both concluded that, even though we are aware of the negative impacts, we liked the thinking time alone, it is not stress induced. It is a time we get our best thinking done. Or more thinking is perhaps a better description.
I didn't have a great take-away from this post, but to suggest that post activity could also have a correlation with sleepless thoughts.
I'm positive a Balmer Peak exists for the quality of these posts.
> I'm positive a Balmer Peak exists for the quality of these posts.
Aha! I have thought this for some time, that there is a level of tiredness where I actually get quite a bit more done. Likely because I am too tired to split my focus and have my mind wander.
That said I find my effectiveness at decision making deteriorates, so it would only be good for tasks where the right path is obvious. For important complex decisions I think I am still better off well rested.
> That said I find my effectiveness at decision making deteriorates, so it would only be good for tasks where the right path is obvious. For important complex decisions I think I am still better off well rested.
My experience is the same. Sadly it's not just specific decision making, but all the important parts of my life depend on me having good executive function or they might happen even if I know the way forward.
I think I might have saw something about this in the book When, but might have been a different one. They described it as when tired, the guards of judgement that normally stand when we're well slept are less active. Not sure how accurate it is, still trying to test it.
> For important complex decisions I think I am still better off well rested.
100%.
I find myself quite productive in situations where my body wants to do something- eat, drink, sleep, etc and I’m putting it off until i finish some key thing.
There are a few responses to this comment that suggest people being better on less sleep. You should also consider that your mind tricks you into thinking you are better on less sleep. Your own subjective measure of your performance is hindered.
The big question is, does the lack of sleep cause the increased levels of cringe scatteredness in the blog posts (and presumably elsewhere too), or do (temporary) high levels of cringe and disorganization in one's life cause a lack of sleep? Or, there could be some hidden variable driving both. Some stressor causing both lack of sleep and scattered thinking.
In the future maybe we'll have at home tomography or new sensors for cheaply measuring more biomarkers longitudinally and be able to pick up what the hidden variable(s) are.
I think rather than less sleep causing worse blog posts, both having a common cause is a more likely explanation. For instance stress, or spending too much time writing careless blogposts instead of sleeping :P
Indeed there is a massive confounding factor in OP's dataset: they have recently written about their bipolar disorder diagnosis, which usually pairs less need for sleep with overconfidence and high self-esteem, but probably isn't causal in the way you or I might write poorly when sleep deprived.
As an example: consider the datapoint "Turning Down the Nobel Prize"[1], which appears to be the pre-launch announcement for their startup to literally cure cancer, drops a bunch of names, then implies they deserve an instant Nobel prize -- but not before another personal hero and pioneer gets one.
This data may be useful for OP in their own diagnosis and self-care, but is still n=1 in one very important dimension relevant to the rest of us.
Yeah, I highly doubt it has anything to do with a manic episode. It's some PR, some self deprecating humor, and it calls out someone else as deserving the credit.
And I'll go one further than 'weird attempt'- I think it's funny, at least enough to justify its length.
Not trying to kick anyone when they're down but it's massively important context to the dataset and to the writing. To quote the sleep metric database, that post was written on a 5.5 hour sleep day, in a long running streak of them. That's pretty textbook mania phase IMO. As supporting evidence, while it may have been an attempt at self deprecating humor, it also fits in the author's timeline listed elsewhere[1].
Yeah... also this person writes about some pretty intense psychological trouble. Seems like their manic episodes are one cause of both poor sleep and aggressive writing.
I have some (imperfect) sense of how sharp I am at some time, or am likely going to be in the near future, which influences when I tackle tasks.
Algorithm that must be correct? It's not going to be working through that first thing in the morning, nor squeeze it into the 30-minute gap between 2 meetings. And hopefully it doesn't have to be done on that day I didn't sleep well, because I can tell I'm not at my best.
When something that needs hard thinking must be done right then, I can do it (and probably still better than most people, if it's something I'm good at). But I often have the feeling that I'd be thinking of more possibilities, or not making "careless" oversights, were I not fatigued or distracted.
Occasionally, I've pulled off some of my most meticulous work despite being fatigued. But it felt like more exertion than it should, and presumably I wasn't spotting all the opportunities that I would've under better conditions.
That said, as someone who doesn't blog, I don't much filter my more casual, off-the-cuff Internet posts by sleep/sharpness. Actually, Internet posts are more likely to be a morning warm-up, or a break between tasks. Maybe, if Internet posts paid better, I'd start optimizing sharpness for them.
My small personal litmus-test for "I may be impaired right now and not realize it" involves typos which I don't immediately notice and self-correct within a split second of typing them.
It means I'm either not really focused on what I'm doing, or I'm looking in the right place but my instinctive "that word looks wrong" recognition isn't firing.
It may not have the statistical rigor of analyzing a whole blog-post, but it's a lot easier to apply. :p
I don't track page views since I moved to GitHub Pages (and I took off google analytics). Probably a good thing, as removes incentive to think less but provoke more.
This is a great visual. Wonder if you could do sentiment analysis too? I use a bunch of sleep trackers and have spent 5 years to correlate poor sleep to bad listening/more misunderstandings. Wouldn't have noticed it without the data.
> I use a bunch of sleep trackers and have spent 5 years to correlate poor sleep to bad listening/more misunderstandings
Interesting. Have you posted anything online about your findings? I think we are at an interesting time where now people have many years of sleep data and we can see more precisely what used to be discussed in more general terms.
> Wonder if you could do sentiment analysis too?
Would be fairly easy to do (LLMs also give a good quick and dirty way to do it). Maybe at some point.
> Interesting. Have you posted anything online about your findings? I think we are at an interesting time where now people have many years of sleep data and we can see more precisely what used to be discussed in more general terms.
Thank you for the inspiration, have been thinking about this for a few days and will likely create a website. Will comment here with a link when i have it :)
Sleep deprivation is basically a form of impairment, but it gets a "this is fine" pass from society in most cases¹. I think anyone who has done SRE knows this: I'm an idiot if I'm up at 4a trying to debug something, and the risk of dumb errors is pretty high.
… what kills me is when people schedule stuff to be done … basically, while impaired. I work in healthtech, and (considerably ironically, given the article above also coming from healthcare…) providers will schedule migrations at 1 to 4am in the morning. SWE is difficult enough as it is, but you want me to think about IPSec and CGNAT at 1am?
The bad reason given across the industry is always "we can't do it during the day, because that's when users are using the system!" Your processes are broken, then, if you have so little faith in your ability to deploy new stuff. (And it is possible; my company, in healthtech, used to regularly do mid-day deployments, because we had processed in place such that a failed deployment would usually get caught. The ones that didn't, well, deploying them at 1am wouldn't have made it better. In fact, we had at least one PM from an outage where that it went out after-hours made the outage worse.)
Rimworld (the video game) has an interesting system where pawns have a "consciousness" value; normally is 100%, but things can lower it, e.g., drinking, drugs, brain injuries. A pawn with a lower consciousness value is simply worse at everything. And there are days, and times — e.g., when I'm sleep deprived after a long night of battling prod — that yeah, I am definitely operating at like 60% consciousness. Everything suffers as a result.
> but [where I] was generating a similar amount of tokens,
> I can say, "hey, might be interesting ideas here, but don't train too heavily on this".
… good grief, just no. I for one do not "generate tokens" nor do I "train" on blog posts. Language like that devalues the abilities of a mind.
¹there are a few spots, like truck drivers, where society starts to care.
I appreciate the reference to Rimworld, and I agree with your thoughts on late night deploys.
We also don't do deploys at night, since as you alluded to it is the time when you are least supported and least capable (assuming you are normally asleep then at least)
This tends to mean that you put your best team members on the 1am job just in case something goes wrong, which is a pretty poor reward for being effective.
Congrats? I can’t remember the last time I slept 10+ hours. Probably once in the last few years when I was exceptionally sick.
My range would be more like 3-7.5 hours, with (thankfully) few nights in the 3-hour range. 4.5 is not uncommon, as I am a light sleeper and once I wake up due to temperature, noise, or whatever, I rarely manage to get back to sleep. Fork in the disposal.
I sleep that little/much while recovering from travelling across 5+ hour time differences, which I do somewhat regularly.
Commenting because I imagine this is a common reason for sleep deprivation.
Lots of 2 hour nights due to not being tired at the right time, then complete exhaustion as I try to make it to a normal bedtime the next day, usually resulting in passing out early and getting 10+ hours in total.
Could it be because of a correlation between sleep hours and time off? I'd be more likely to write on a Sunday, and I'd also be more likely to sleep late on a Sunday.
> I think continued progress in the wearable sensor field...
I'm interested in people's general experience with wearable sensors - of whichever type. I wear a Fitbit (mostly for sleep tracking) but it's mostly a curiosity rather than something that offers meaningful, actionable insights.
And I'm experimenting with deliberately tracking my metrics less in other areas. As a cyclist, it's easy to get sucked into the metrics world, with easy access to HR and power, training plans, and sharing your performances online... but I found I wasn't enjoying the activity of cycling very much. A friend hypothesised that the inherent comparison and competition might be to blame, and suggested to try removing most of the data tracking; it's early days yet though.
> ...is the best bet for improving human health.
I'd posit that avoidance of behaviours which are well-known to cause dierct harm to one's health is probably a better place to start.
I use an Apple Watch for sleep tracking and it seems to do relatively well. Whilst I haven’t found the data directly actionable, it has been useful when talking to healthcare providers in the past.
In keeping with the HN tradition of off-topic comments about a submission's website design, I'm going to say I love the design of the blog's homepage. I find it very strange that it flows by column instead of by row, but I love the overall newspaper-like layout. I think there is a strange beauty in that chaos, and it's easy to get a birds-eye view of what the author cares and writes about.
> I find it very strange that it flows by column instead of by row
Years ago I was trying to get it to flow by row, but couldn't figure out the CSS columns stuff, and then realized I like the column flow, because it surfaced older content next to new content, which I think is what I'm going for (think/write about the things I find most timeless).
I can confirm it totally worked in that sense at first glance, but it comes at the cost that I’m still going to browse chronologically, so I’m going to have to go up and down a lot.
