Sleep vs productivity

Life
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Hi all,

here’s my fresh blog post: Marcin Borkowski: 2025-01-20 Sleep versus productivity.

TL;DR: I ran a simple statistical analysis of my sleep data vs some quantification of my productivity. The correlation is almost non-existent.

If someone has any idea how to perform this experiment in a better way, I’m all ears!

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How did you define “enough” sleep though? If all the variance is around getting up at 5am (and getting about 7 hours of sleep per night), then it could be the case that you simply never got enough “enough sleep” to matter? And I am saying that just from the point of view of defining the underlying hypothesis in a more solid way :slight_smile: not because I am projecting my own experience which is that I personally would stop functioning after just a couple of weeks of such schedule, let alone years :slight_smile:

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I noticed something similar when I was looking at my data, it’s hard to connect hours slept to anything useful productivity wise.

For a while I just concluded “OK cool, sleep doesn’t matter much, fuck sleep” and ignored it, which was not good.

What seems to be true for me is:

  • I will generally do a similar # of tasks and work a similar # of hours regardless of sleep
  • It’s hard to quantify the quality of work, which is not captured by the factors above
  • sleep hours don’t matter very much for me (as long as it’s >= 6 / night, and as long as I take occasional naps)
  • stress / resilience measurements (~= HRV) matter affect work quality a lot (even if this is subjective)

I wish I had a less “woo” answer to this than “it can’t be measured, but believe me it’s a thing”.

I think the core benefits I get out of (subjectively) higher work quality are these:

  1. I’m much better at writing & communicating, and it takes less effort to do so – this is not valuable for all jobs, but it is quite valuable for my job (which is technically “dense”)
  2. I don’t need to break things down nearly as much, and it’s far easier to tackle the whole thing at once – just kind of dive in and figure it out
  3. As a side effect of 2, I spot major problems / direction issues much sooner, and as a side effect of 1, I can effectively communicate these issues and get projects pivoted / closed faster

I’m not currently measuring these things, because they’re inherently hard to measure (maybe projects closed could be a way to determine this if I start tracking that)

But I’m confident they have a huge impact on my pace & career

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