two-month reflection

Background info

My schedule is to have a core-sleep of 4.5 hours at night, and then 20-minute naps at around 7am, 11am, 3pm, and 7pm. If I start the core-sleep particularly early or late, I’ll sometimes add an 11pm or a 3am nap. A primary goal of mine is flexibility, so although I never skip naps, I’ll take them anywhere from an hour before to an hour after the target time. And although my core-sleep is always 4.5 hours, it can start (these days) anywhere from 10pm to 2am.

Vacation report

One of my partner’s biggest concerns about this experience (see a partner’s perspective) was imagining how our summer vacation with in-laws would work out given my switch to polyphasic sleep. Some of her polyphasic concerns have shrunken over time, due in large part to my commitment to flexibility and ability to nap in ways and at time not obvious to others, thus minimizing ‘nap-impact’, and due to the extra chores I do and that the household generally perceives me as ‘nicer’ now that I have more personal/creative time. But the vacation concern remained. Short summary, it was fine.

One striking benefit of the schedule was that I had no jet-lag either from Rhode Island to California, or back. The backup timer I use for my core-sleeps (and the occasional crawl-in-bed-and-luxuriate-20-minute-nap) has, in addition to an optional beeper and optional light-flasher, an optional vibration feature. So I used that for my unobtrusive in-flight nap-alarm, which worked fine, and I adjusted the nap target-times slightly to account for the 3-hour time-zone difference so that I’d just be ‘on-track’ at the destination. Now jet-lag has never been a serious problem for me in the past, but its absence was noticeable and welcome.

The first segment of our trek was a few days in a hotel suite in Santa Cruz. Each kid got a small bedroom and Trace and I shared a pullout in the living room. I setup my laptop at a desk and spent most of the wee-hours of the morning doing computer stuff, bundled up in a blanket in the cool California morning air. As an aside, I’ll note that when I researched the purchase of this Apple PowerBook (new models are called MacBook Pro), I didn’t care at all about the ‘lighted keyboard’ feature, and in fact thought it frivolous. But I’ve come to love it over the years, and this was yet another time that the elegance of this laptop’s design was much appreciated.

A sleep vacation-pattern we fell into that we really liked was that I’d check in with Trace the evening before to get a sense of when she wanted to get up, and then time my morning nap so that I’d crawl into bed 20 minutes before that time – another benefit of the flexibility-priority with which I’ve approached this sleep schedule.

We were together in Santa Cruz for a few days, then Trace and the kids headed up toward the home-base in the Napa Valley, while I spent about three days doing my annual visit to the Bay Area crew. I’ll post about the fascinating aspects of maintaining quality relationships with folk I see, and communicate with, only once a year, but regarding sleep, I made a significant adjustment for these days. After skipping a few naps early on — extremely uncharacteristic for me, I realized that the wildly varying schedule of visiting these 5 individuals scattered around the Bay Area, along with the intensity of our mutually wanting to soak up as much time with one-another as possible — made even the flexible target times feel too restrictive. I wanted to be able to go with the interpersonal flow as much as possible. So I allowed 6-hour sleeps these three nights, and got in naps whenever it was convenient. I was surprised that I still slept during many of the naps given the long core; I attribute this to the emotional and physical-exertion of frequent travel and spirit-exertion of connecting with these great souls. Then for the remaining week I headed back up to join the rest of the family in a small guest-house where I shifted back to the 4.5 hour core and 4+ naps. One nice aspect of having the early morning hours there was that the mountain guest-house had only modem internet-access, using a line shared with the main house that is heavily-used during the day, so it would have been quite uncool to have it tied up. Thus it was pretty convenient to be able to hop on without worry at 4am for my daily internet fix.

Summary

So, again, I plan on doing this indefinitely. I do periodically have moments where I have flashes of irritation at a ‘required’ interruption to a flow during the day or evening in order to get a nap in, despite the fexible 2-hour window around my target times. But recently I played Warcraft III and Halo with my younger son, on a work-night, until 1:30am, and on another recent night I got up at 3am and finished a really cool piece of a work-project, did some chores, caught up on finances-management, and wrote to a friend, all before the 7am nap. Given that I work long hours (at a job I love), this is just so cool to be able to do.

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