So I’ve pretty much always had issues with sleep, even since I was a little kid. I remember being small enough to get tucked in, begging for a nightlight, not because I was afraid of the dark (like I pretended), but just because I needed it to read by. I’d hide books under the covers and stay up all night long, reading.

This same basic idea rolled along through my teen years and as I began to get more actively entrepreneurial, in my business life as well. Staying up forever working on projects (“Flights to Africa” as the microserfs would put it) became the norm and I was excited to do it.

The grinding wheel of time continued on, bringing with it children and wives and mortgages, oh my. I had always heard stories about random figures from history who would mess with their own sleep schedule to try to squeeze as much productive time out of their lives as possible. Da Vinci, Edison, and Einstein are all reputed to have had unique sleep patterns that supposedly maximized their efficiency.

The umbrella term for this practice/discipline/eccentricity is “Polyphasic Sleep”.

For your tangential pleasure, here’s a wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyphasic_sleep

The basic concept is that you still try to get a healthy amount of sleep, but instead of getting it all in one go, you space it out over 24 hours. It seems like 45 minutes to 2 hours seems to be most often mentioned time frame. Proponents say that it refreshes you but prevents your descent into the waking lethargy that can accompany the full 8 hours.

Can changing your sleep schedule make you more productive?

I’m still pretty young, but I have to admit, with a couple small children in the house, the idea of intentional napping is starting to sound pretty wicked. What do you think? Has anyone tried this kind of thing? Any benefits or horror stories you’d like to share?

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