Sleep Deprivation and Developing Software

Are You Getting Enough Sleep?

Do you get at about 8 hours of sleep a night, night after night? I don’t.

I normally get less than six hours of sleep, sometimes substantially less. And I work a long hours while building a bigger and better business.  Not to mention blogging most days (OK, not recently, but that is ending soon, as I will have more time to write).

I’ve read plenty of articles on sleep over the years, but the new post by James Clear is packed with the latest information on how lack of sleep affects your body and your brain.  Consider the following:

The researchers began the experiment by gathering 48 healthy men and women who had been averaging seven to eight hours of sleep per night. Then, they split these subjects into four groups. The first group had to stay up for 3 days straight without sleeping. The second group slept for 4 hours per night. The third group slept for 6 hours per night. And the fourth group slept for 8 hours per night. In these final three groups—4, 6, and 8 hours of sleep—the subjects were held to these sleep patterns for two weeks straight. Throughout the experiment the subjects were tested on their physical and mental performance.

Here’s what happened…

The subjects who were allowed a full 8 hours of sleep displayed no cognitive decreases, attention lapses, or motor skill declines during the 14-day study. Meanwhile, the groups who received 4 hours and 6 hours of sleep steadily declined with each passing day. The four-hour group performed worst, but the six-hour group didn’t fare much better.

The bolding in the last paragraph is my mine.  I bolded it because the effects of getting too little sleep are so profound:

  • After two weeks of 6 hours of sleep a night, the participants had performance deficits equivalent to staying awake for two days straight.
  • Participants were not aware of their performance deficits.  They thought they adjusted after a while.

That last one really hit home.  I wasn’t happy about getting less sleep, but had not been too concerned about it and learned to operate just fine with it.  Or so I thought.  But operating continuously as though I had been up for 48 hours straight?  The extra hours awake enjoying life and work were not worth that price.

If you are a developer, or any other job requiring advanced thinking skills, for that matter, your career and well being depends upon your ability to think.  Not to mention your clients happiness with your work.

 

Sleep Deprivation

 

What Can You Do?

So do what I did  when I learned about this:  read the rest of Clear’s article to learn more about the effects of sleep deprivation and what you can do to improve your sleep.  I did, and I am working on ways to get back to 8 hours a night, every night.  My business and my quality of life depend on it.


Here’s one humorous example lack of sleep had on me.

Recently, I was having problems getting one of the eight plugins I have in FileMaker 15 to work properly.  First, I replaced the plugin with the latest one.  That didn’t work.  Knowing FileMaker supports multiple extension folder locations, I rooted around and found three.  I started copying all the plugins into all of the folders, but still had problems with the bad one.

I then pulled them all out and tried just the bad one. Moved some things around. It worked, no problem, and I copied the rest back in, and only the new one was working.  By this time, I was a bit frustrated, so I did a quick search to find out exactly which folders were supported by FileMaker.

I found a great post called Plugin Mayhem at the top of my first search.  It’s a great article about the new FileMaker plugin folder locations.

One I wrote almost two years ago–I had completely forgotten it.  Not one of my better moments…

Anyway, I read the post, followed my advice and made sure I was using the proper folders, and still had problems.  It turned out I had somehow copied aliases (shortcuts) of my plugins to the proper folders, not the real files.

When I read Clear’s article on sleep deprivation the other day, I immediately thought about this episode, and vowed to get more sleep.


After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood.

Fred Thompson, Speech before the Commonwealth Club of California
US Senator, 1994-2002, actor

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