About a week ago, I was spending every minute I had on an assignment for my natural language processing class. My partner and I were already behind from starting the class a week late (we started out taking a different class), and it was a pretty long assignment. We probably each put 50 hours into it in a span of 5 days, on top of the usual course load and one day of work for me.
However, I noticed something interesting. I was really productive throughout this entire time, partly because of the time-crunch, and partly because of my rule to sleep 7 hours a night. Without the excuse of “Oh well, I’ll just slack off a little now and sleep later tonight,” I really had to focus on my work.
I’ve heard Parkinson’s Law pretty often: work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. I always sort of dismissed this as true but not terribly useful. It actually is very applicable though: I now set a hard deadline of 1 AM for my day’s work (as opposed to a soft deadline of 12:30 – 3:00 AM). Everything important still gets done. The difference is that I’m getting my sleep (so I’m happier, less exhausted, etc) and I spend less time on frivolous things, so I feel less guilty.
Things have eased up by now, but I’m still seeing the positive effects of the 7-hour rule. Who knew it would have such a big impact?
Um, me? =P Glad it’s working out for you. I’ve been feeling the same way since I have to sleep in time to wake up for work. Except this Friday I didn’t have that deadline and I watched TED talks for waaay too long and didn’t get any work done (i.e. finding a bank).