The phrase "Time Is Money" comes to us from the ancient Greek orator Antiphon (430 BC). Man has a history of struggling to make more money, but the attempts to create more time fall into the realm of crazy people. Of course there are crack-pot theories about time-travel and less crack-pot ideas about time-management, but there is also the very interesting but still pretty crack-pot idea of Polyphasic Sleep.

Polyphasic sleep gained some notoriety from Buckminster Fuller, who spent two years taking 30 minute naps every six hours, reducing his whole total sleep time to just three hours.

This is a proposal for Mike Merrill to attempt a polyphasic sleeping schedule for the fourth quarter of 2009 (October, November, December). If it is achieved it should result in an additional 3 to 4 hours of productivity added to each day.

The process will of course be well documented.



http://www.kmikeym.com/questions/33

A very enthusiastic "aye!" from me

I think the most important thing we have to consider it what the actual goals are in attempthing polyphase sleep. If it is to do something new, and innovative, and document the process, and therefore bring traffic/eyes/$$$ to the kmikeym.com exchange, then I fully support it. There is a suggestion, then, that articles on the polyphase experience will be posted in a number of locations. I'm suggesting at least:
o Slashdot
o Digg
o Possibly drop a note to the techcrunch crew
o Definitely want a posting on news.ycombinator.com.

If there is a productivity desire, then it's less clear to me - on the one side, any new environment/experience typically shakes us out of our day-day morass, and causes us to focus and pay attention to the world with greater attention. Also, getting a few extra hours a day might make a difference (though, in my experience, most people are usually only capable of 2-3 hours of actual real intellectual output a day - they may sprint for a week or two of 8-Hour days of output, but then they may go a month without really accomplishing anything)

Finally, the one downside of a polyphase sleep schedule, is that you are out of sync with the rest of the world - that will probably what will end this experiment at the end. You always have to stop whatever you are doing in the middle of the day to sleep, and you are up late at night when everyone else is awake. We may _think_ we like avoiding the distractions of other people, but the reality is we are social creatures, and even if we aren't engaging with them, it's important to have other people around us.

But, for the marketing aspect, and the new life experience aspect, I vote YES on this idea..

GHShep, my understanding is that this *is* motivated by productivity, and I believe Mike, of all people, is capable of taking advantage of the extra hours.

But I love the idea of pushing it out for publicity. In the context of going public, his choice to move to a 24-hour schedule and maximize productivity for his shareholders could really catch on as a story.

Regarding How much you are sleeping - I've been an avid user of "http://www.myzeo.com/" for the last couple months - last thing I do before going to sleep is slip it on. Every week or so I download the wireless stats. What I like about it is that it collects a lot more than "Amount of Sleep" - calculates total REM, Deep Sleep, Light Sleep, as well as how many times you woke up in the evening, and how fast you fell asleep. As an added bonus it even has a smart alarm clock that avoids sleep inertia by waking you up as you are going into/out of REM sleep.

We're coming down to the crunch, and it looks like the "Ayes" have it for polyphase sleeping. I'll have to admit that I'm pretty excited to see how this works out for Mike. I'm wondering why Greg voted against idea - didn't get a chance to see his feedback on the topic, unless it was posted under another name?

It's my impression that Greg values the vote of Willow, and will often follow her lead.

She voted no on this because we share a bed, so her reasons are somewhat selfish.

After reading more about this I am going to try the Everyman

http://k5mprb.tumblr.com/post/168322166/polyphasic

It reduces my sleep amount in half, and the schedule seems like something I can stick with as two of the naps occur at work. The 9pm will be hard because that is a time when I'm likely to be out doing something, and also it will be difficult to wake up after that one.

ridiculous new couch at work (yellow, faux-suede) is making me strongly consider bi-phasic plan of attack. there's a CD player down here, i could just pop in some ambient stuff to drown out the kids in the wading pool and it would be all i'd need.