Fabulous news – I have been back on my modified Everyman program since August 8. I haven’t been able to keep it up since March, due to fairly severe work- and relational-stress. Polyphasic simply does not work well, as a rule, in difficult personal situations. I think PureDoxyk’s adaptation to Uberman is extremely unusual in that regard (she adapted well despite a major depression and sleep difficulties going on at the time). This confirms my belief that a good night’s sleep requires peace of mind.
Things are starting to look up, for several reasons. My marriage has straightened out. My internet business, WordPress Academy, is successful, and I have several other very interesting business opportunities. I am gradually relaxing into the realization / certainty that it’s not possible for a smart and determined person to NOT make money in my sector, which is internet marketing, social media and product development. I am actually creating a whole team to support these businesses, of people who are working for equity for the most part, and this is super-fun. I am also engaging deeply with a transformational organization and a business network called Flawless Living, which is meeting my needs for personal transformation and affiliation, my core mission.
So it’s not surprising that with all these exciting events, the quality of my sleep is improving.
I am not doing Everyman in any kind of rigorous way, and this seems to be working for me. I am generally “intending” to get up around 3am and work for 3 hours, and I work a second shift of 3-4 hours from 10am to 1 or 2, followed by my main nap – but if I am too tired or not feeling well, I sleep in. I do try and get to the gym every day, but that also I don’t force myself. I have discovered that if I work the evening before (for instance I teach some evenings), I won’t get up for the first shift. This occurred as something of an “Aha” experience – I don’t WANT TO work at night and be polyphasic, as I don’t really want to work more than 6-7 hours in a day – and the fact that this hadn’t been obvious to me from the beginning confirmed my workaholism, my lack of judgment and perspectives on issues of time-management.
6 or 7 hours of work per day may not seem like a lot of work, but it is for me (especially highly focused creative work, which it is), and it leaves me all afternoon and evening free, which was my goal from the beginning. To say I am delighted is an understatement. I did have to give up coffee entirely, but I can tolerate (need?) one cup of tea in the early morning when I start my first shift. I make a delicious Chai: black tea boiled in water, crushed green cardamon (buy it at any Indian grocery), milk and honey. It gets me very high, and generally works.
I am going to update the rest of the content for this blog shortly as well. This is actually my most popular blog, getting close to 700 unique monthly visits from organic search alone, and I am still pondering whether I can put this traffic to any use. I am envisioning myself developing a series of web businesses, in partnership with others in many different areas, so this is a very interesting exploration for me.
I am still recovering from a workaholic binge early this week (which was very instructive), but I am intending to start a modified Everyman schedule from Monday 3/15. My schedule to look like:
- 2-6am: Work: mostly pure research and study (the thing that is the most difficult for me to fit in), plus a limited amount of personal email and writing (the thing that is most fun for me)
- 6-8am: Exercise and breakfast
- 8-9am: Sleep, or meditate/relaxation exercises
- 9am-1pm: Work: billable hours and general admin
- 1pm: Eat
- 1:30-3:30pm (or whatever): sleep until I am rested
- 4pm onwards – rest of my day as per my pleasure – but hopefully to include some music practice and reading for pleasure
- 9pm – in bed, winding down (spiritual reading and/or listening to music)
- 10pm-2am: sleep
This adds up to 7-8 hours of sleep or relaxation. I am currently sleeping a lot more than this, so this would be a major breakthrough, in addition to the 8 hours of focused work and intellectual effort.
I want to add, that it’s kind of new to me to publish a daily intimate journal for anyone on the web to see — hopefully not too many of my friends and business associates ;-). I write a lot on my personal blog, and very revealing stuff, but only on about a monthly or bimonthly frequency. This is different, more “raw” and in-the-moment, we’ll see if it works…
This, and today’s other post, is my first real writing on this blog in nearly 8 months. I have been through quite a journey, which I will share a very small part of today (by necessity – it would take a book to write it all).
I keep on going back to (anyone’s) fundamental motivation for polyphasic sleep, insisting that it has to be one or both of:
- Consciousness development,
- Business development,
and also that motivation for this experiment would come from several possible sources:
- Feeling generally out-of-control of one’s time and looking for a solution
- Wanting to undertake a consciousness experiment, just for the heck of it (and once again, polyphasic sleep is just about the cheapest and most powerful consciousness experiment one could undertake on one’s own)
- Already running a (reasonably) stable and productive life, but still wanting to increase one’s production or effectiveness.
I fit in all these categories, and as such (to be brutally honest with myself) I am not a good candidate for polyphasic sleep, because I need to get underlying addictive patterns around time and money handled first (or at least get more self-awareness around them).
Which leads me to the main reason I haven’t posted much in the last 8 months: I AM AN ADDICT. A workaholic, first of all – this means that I have lost some connection to my fundamental value, source of meaning, and connection to myself, to my body and fundamental human needs; and that I use work (and it’s close cousins, time and money obsessions) as a distraction. This is a potentially serious condition, with great costs to one’s health, relationships and even business – work addicts can be either workaholic or work-anorexic or both. Work-anorexic means that we may carry on binge and purge cycles with work – work 48 hours in a row and then stay in bed for 3 days for example. So clients may be happy during the 48 hours but may fire you in the next 3 days – it’s not a good work-cycle to get into, or helpful in business. Work-anorexic can also mean that we procrastinate or compulsively avoid work.
That’s me on both counts – workaholic and work-anorexic.
And oh – another reason I haven’t posted much lately: as my life was falling apart around me (for reasons related to the above), and I was unemployed, I questioned the wisdom of posting my narcissistic ramblings all over the web for anyone to see and my friends to read. As of right now, however, (1) I seem to have stabilized my new business, which means I will probably never work a regular (employee job) again, so I don’t care what potential employers find out about me; and (2) My friends don’t read this blog for the most part, so I can say whatever I want. The game that I am playing with this site, is just to write about myself and things that I care about, and see what kind of traffic I can gather (my secret ambition is to be a professional writer – we’ll see about that).
But back to polyphasic sleep —
I have now come to the additional, startling realization, that my relationship to work, time, and money, is the fundamental developmental issue of my life, is at the core of who I am and how I relate to the world, and that there is a great deal of healing that needs to happen if I hope to “awaken” in this lifetime (which is my earnest hope) – or even, to set the standard lower but still adequate, if I hope to have a stable, productive, generous, engaged and related life.
However — I am still beginning my polyphasic sleep experiment again today, March 8, 2010. The fact that I am not a good candidate doesn’t exonerate me from making the attempt.
And if you are new to polyphasic sleep or coming to this blog for the first time, understand that polyphasic sleep is not about sleep-deprivation (that would be unhealthy). It’s a way of increasing the efficiency of your sleep by breaking it down into shorter segments. It’s about gaining greater effectiveness, happiness, clarity and focus in your life – it’s about generating additional time that can be used for any purpose including personal and spiritual development.
If you are reading this far please comment, it will keep me motivated.
Related resources
I was looking around for some simple way to track my time on a 24-hour cycle, found a few articles related to tracking time spent browsing the internet, but nothing for my purposes so I made a simple spreadsheet with automatic tabulation of results. It’s fairly self-explanatory and looks like this:
How to use:
- Download here (right-click > Download to your computer)
- Open in Excel
- Setup your time category labels in column R
- Print out a copy. Write your weekly schedule (or as close approximation as you can) in columns B, D, E etc
- As you go through the day jot down the numeric code of each activity you do per half-hour time slot on the printout, and then later transcribe to the computer. You can choose to record EVERYTHING you do for a week including sleep (I did – it’s quite instructive) or, just write down significant events you want to track (ie, work activity)
- I suggest you follow the procedure in Your Money or Your Life at the end of each week for valuing / prioritizing your time / money use. For each time category, decide if
- You want to spend more time on that activity
- You want to spend less time
- Or, it’s about right
Additional resources
- Found this: Xpert-timer works well for timing project-related activity at the computer. Especially nice is the activity timer, with start/stop clock, and project assignment. I am buying it for work-related activity and automatic invoice generation, but for personal use I still need something on paper that I can fill-in during the day and transcribe
- The ODesk application may work well for this purpose as well, and be free. I need to check it out
- Lots of tools available for the very popular David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology – see Zen Habits: 5 Simple, Effective GTD Tools and/or Google “GTD Tools”.
My issue with all of the above: they are great for work-related tasks, but I want a global solution that includes sleep and personal / recreational time, and that works when I am not at the computer. I don’t want to run my life 24 hours as a project, but I do want to know where my time goes in order to perform a regular assessment / prioritization of my time usage.
I also need (separate project) a tool to track work-hours and automatically generate invoice details for billable hours. Still looking, will follow-up on this later.
About two months ago I wrote an article Polyphasic sleep, consciousness development and business development, in which I explained my fundamental motivation for doing this experiment, which is resolving my tortured relationship to time and money and then using this freedom for business development. Since then, there have been extraordinary events in the development of our commune, and nice progress in developing my internet marketing and social media consulting company. I have also created and am actively engaged in four high-power developmental groups: I have a half-hour every week-day Mastermind call with two friends, I have a group that is exploring synergies and developmental possibilities between the Waking Down in Mutuality and the Shalom Mountain communities, and I have a business development / study group for Project Mojave. In addition I am coaching one-on-one with Saniel Bonder (who is an effin’ genius) and sometimes inviting other people to the call. Despite all successes, it’s been an up-and-down process, polyphasic sleep has been irregular at best, and my coffee addiction is substantially unchanged. I had therefore concluded in my previous article that polyphasic sleep had been an extremely valuable thing for my own personal (consciousness) development, but the jury was still out whether it would lead to any results in terms of business development.
I want to suggest that consciousness development is a fundamental goal for anyone who attempts a polyphasic sleep experiment, even if they do not declare it as such. And that business development (prosperity) flows from that, but it may take a little time.
Think of it. Short of actually going to live in an ashram or doing an intensive meditation retreat, what could be a better consciousness experiment than polyphasic sleep? It can be done at home in the midst of one’s everyday activities, it doesn’t cost anything, and it can lead to dramatic personal transformation. In the case of the Uberman schedule, this is doubly true as it has pronounced consciousness altering effects as well – I really like Ka Ntru’s blog on this topic (search for “polyphasic sleep”).
After 5 months on this experiment what is gradually emerging is that the leading edge of my own development is deepening and clarifying my relationship with my wife, Rebekah. This is an awesome yet shocking realization – awesome in terms of the possibilities, and shocking in that this had not been obvious to me before. In my usual masculine, goal-oriented, single-pointed consciousness, bulldozer style of being, I have been speeding forward without great awareness or concern for the people around me and their needs. Perhaps this was developmentally appropriate and timely – and I can hardly complain about the results – but the time has come to get this handled. It’s possible as well that “getting this handled” is a masculine problem-solving approach towards a situation that is likely to be a lifetime of work – oh lucky me to have such an interesting problem to solve, as the problem of relating lovingly and deeply and powerfully all the time to the person with whom I have chosen to share my life (and my business!).
I am planning a major post on this topic to the Lifestyle Design blog soon.
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Quotes "Sleeping is no mean art: for its sake one must stay awake all day".
- Friedrich Nietzsche
"No day is so bad it can't be fixed with a nap".
- Carrie Snow |
