There seem to be two camps when it comes to sleep. Those that think that you can get by with the minimum amount of sleep to take advantage of more awake time and those that think you need your full cycles of sleep to function at your best. I fall into the “get your sleep” camp and here are three reasons why.

Sleep is your chance to clear out the neurotoxins in your brain

I was discussing neuroplasticity with my holistic doctor recently when she mentioned that there was new research showing a lymphatic system in our brain. The lymphatic system in our bodies clears out toxins and other debris. How does the lymphatic system in our brain work?

Interestingly, Dr. Lulu Xie [1] discovered that while we’re sleeping, brain cells shrink and the space between the cells is filled with fluid. The brain cells release their waste into this fluid and the toxins get swept away, readying your brain for another day.

Clearing out the detritus that accumulates in our brain leaves us ready to focus and to think. Essentially it’s like a nightly cleanse, except all you have to do is go to sleep. Productivity and thinking create the garbage, sleep is our brain’s way of clearing it out and preparing us to perform again.

What is a good night’s sleep?

If you make the decision to get a good night’s sleep you should aim for 7 to 9 hours a night. That’s the range that most adults need.

Most of my life, I aimed for between five and six hours of sleep, thinking that having the extra few hours of awake time would make the difference that I needed to get that extra edge. It turned out that my body craved more sleep and naturally migrated towards more over less. This included falling asleep every time I got in a car.

When I made a conscious choice to go to bed earlier and to try to get at least seven hours of sleep, I felt better and was more alert throughout the day. It turns out that I’m not alone.

In studies where scientists purposely deprive subjects of sleep, the subjects essentially become drunk people — losing cognitive ability and coordination over time.[2] We’re not talking huge sleep deprivation, either. The test subjects were restricted to six hours of sleep a night.

The interesting and surprising part is that the effects were cumulative. The longer you don’t get enough sleep, the greater your loss in cognitive ability. Oh, and did I mention that you won’t realize that you’re losing your edge? Subjects didn’t realize that they were getting slower and less alert. They thought they were just as productive and smart as at the beginning of the study.

Sleep improves your physical performance

There have been lots of studies about lack of sleep and how it affects our energy levels and our mental acuity and alertness. We know that we shouldn’t cut our sleep to gain any sort of edge. But what about extending our sleep?

If you get extra sleep — as much as you want, you will become better physiologically. A study performed at Stanford, showed that basketball players who were told to sleep as much as possible were faster and more accurate than when they slept on a lighter cycle (ten hours versus seven hours).[3]

This means that not only is not getting enough sleep bad for you, getting lots of sleep is good for you. Sleeping as much as you want isn’t really an option for most of us. Those halcyon days to teenagehood where we got to sleep in until ten are long gone. Heck, I feel guilty sleeping in until nine on weekends.

My point is that sleep is restorative and our minds and bodies need that restoration to perform at our best.

You need to sleep

Sleep is the body’s way of reviving itself both mentally and physically. Instead of trying to cut into our sleeping hours when we want to be productive, we should be taking advantage of the body’s built in rejuvenator. Sleep enough and you’ll be more alert, clear-headed, and able to perform at your peak.

How many hours do you get in? Do you feel like you need more or less? And more importantly, what are you going to do about it?

[1] Sleep Drives Metabolite Clearance from the Adult Brain

[2] The cumulative cost of additional wakefulness: dose-response effects on neurobehavioral functions and sleep physiology from chronic sleep restriction and total sleep deprivation.

[3] The Effects of Sleep Extension on the Athletic Performance of Collegiate Basketball Players

I’m a firm believer in Parkinson’s law and the idea that work expands to fill the amount of time we give it. I call actively controlling your work-time, time-boxing.

For example, my timer is set to twenty-five minute increments or blocks. If a task is going to take ninety minutes, I block out the time in my calendar, set my timer, and get to work. At the end of every twenty-five minutes, I stretch my legs, get a cup of tea, or a glass of water then get back to it. At the end of ninety minutes, I call it done and move on. I keep track of my time-blocks by ticking them off in my dailybook.

I’m using a timer as I write this — you should be using a timer too.

I’m a perfectionist. I will worry over a sentence for thirty minutes. I’ll spend an hour making sure a line is drawn perfectly straight in my journal. While these noble causes make perfect sense in my head, They don’t make sense for my work or my life. Without a limit, you never reach “good enough” and are always looking for perfect.

Parkinson’s law is the idea that the time a task will take will fill the available time. In other words, your work will expand to fill the amount of time you give it. A paper that is due in three weeks will take three weeks to finish. The same paper, given three days, will take just three days.

You might be wondering if the quality of the three-week article will be better than the quality of the three-day article. It probably would be better, but does it really matter? And is the quality that much better? I’ll surmise that the gap in quality isn’t as great as you would think. The more you learn to work in focused increments, the better you get at getting good things done in less time.

What does this have to do with using a timer, you say?

A timer is that deadline that makes you actually do the work and accept good enough over perfect.

Here’s how you can implement time-boxing. This is a bastardization of the Pomodoro technique used by many. It’s a sort of do it and move on method.

• Get a timer. There are a ton of free browser extensions and a handy one on your phone.
• Start with twenty-five minute increments and adjust the time to your own working style.
• Set a limit on how much time you’ll spend working on a project or task and write it down.

For example, an article gets thirty minutes to write, thirty minutes to edit, thirty minutes to research and publish. That’s a total of three blocks of thirty for ninety minutes total. Write the number of blocks down and commit.

Start your timer and hold yourself to your time blocks.

1. After the first thirty minutes, your draft is written. Take a break; stretch your legs.
2. Your second thirty minutes is spent polishing your draft and cleaning it up.
3. You last thirty minutes is spent filling in the blanks — adding references, double checking your facts. Hit publish.

At the end of this process you’ll have an article written and published. It might not be the perfect article, but it will be at least eighty percent as good as if you’d spent three hours on it.

The cool thing about time blocks is that you get better and more skilled the more you use them. You’re able to focus and work faster — and most importantly, you’ll spend less time perfecting and more time getting the work done.

If you use a similar technique, let me know how it works for you in the comments. If you find this useful, pass it along to your friends.

There are a lot of things that I like — watches, sunglasses, warm coats, and nice pens are just a few. Maybe I like these things just a little too much. I got in the habit of swinging by the Sunglass Hut on my way out of town on business trips. They seem to be one of the few stores that carry the smaller frames that fit my face. I’d splurge on a pair of nice glasses as a reward for traveling (because somehow I needed a reward to go to cool places?).

We end up with a lot of stuff. Whether it’s as a reward or just because. Clothes, shoes, and books are just some of the things we fill our lives with. But how much is too much?

• Do you ever lose something like the book you’re reading and spend hours searching for it under all the other stuff laying around?

• Do you stare at your packed closet unable to choose which outfit you’re going to wear?

• Do you ever just sweep the top of your desk into a box so you have room to work?

Last Christmas, I read Marie Kondo’s “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing“. I looked around the house and realized that I had too much stuff. And what was worse, was that it was a lot of stuff that I didn’t like or care about (an alligator clip man for holding photos, anyone?).

The KonMari method of de-cluttering is unconventional at the very least. If you can get past the anthropomorphizing of socks, it is great. Here’s the method in a nutshell:

1. “Tidy” by type, not by location. That means you’ll be going through all of your clothes, all of your books, and then all of your miscellaneous stuff separately.

2. Put everything in a pile in the center of a room.

3. Hold each item and determine if it “sparks joy”. This was a bit difficult for me at first — what exactly does “sparking joy” mean?

4. Put the stuff that doesn’t make a spark in a box or a bag and don’t look back.

KonMari has you go through your belongings in a specific order so that you get the hang of it on the easy stuff (hint: books and photos are really hard). The cool part of this method is that you can keep your ratty old AC/DC t-shirt as long as it sparks joy!

I went through my house over the holiday break between Xmas and New Years. In the first round, I ended up with a pile of 20 boxes. The second round generated another ten, plus eleven boxes of books that went to the used book store and to the library.

That’s a lot of stuff that didn’t spark joy in our house. Hopefully, it’s off sparking joy for someone else.

Which brings me to my sunglass problem. I pulled ten pairs of sunglasses out of various drawers and pockets on Monday. And these weren’t the ten dollar variety that you get at a kiosk. Apparently, they all “sparked joy” last December. (Did I mention I had a hard time with the “spark joy” thing?).

All but three are now going to the Lions Club Eyeglass donation drive. Someone is going to be very lucky, and I’m going to try to be less of a glutton.

I’m not really sure what made me try the technique. Probably a time-management seminar where it was the only tip I hadn’t tried. Whatever the reason, I gave it a go. The result was transforming. This one change to my day has created an amazing boost to what I get done and to how I feel about my work.

If I ‘eat the frog’ first, I can chat at the water cooler, watch YouTube, or (more likely) spend my entire day in meetings and still feel like I had a productive day.

How it works

Every morning, I “eat the frog” after I finish my morning routine. I take a look at my daily TODO list — specifically at the one thing I’d like to do that day. If I haven’t set my one thing the night before, I’ll think about what would make my day awesome (yes, seriously) and then close my apps and and start working on that thing.

I work on this task for at least an hour or until my first meeting of the day. If I finish before the hour is up, then “yay!”. If I have to stop before I’m finished, I’ll save future brain cycles by making a note to myself in Evernote or on the document itself.

If you have problems with distraction, try using Freedom, or in Chrome or Safari WasteNoTime to force-limit your distractions and Internet-based addictions during your frog-eating hour.

Here are the steps:

• Don’t read your email first!
• Remind yourself of the ‘one thing’ that you’d like to do today
• Close your apps (except for the ones you need)
• Do it (ideally for a least an hour)
• Note where you left off so you can pick it up easily when you’re ready
• Now go read your email and may the force be with you!

Doing the ‘one thing’ first often reaps some unexpected rewards. You’re ready to face your plethora of meetings knowing that you’ve done some real work for the day. You can focus on your ‘now’ instead of worrying that you’re not getting any work done. If you’re like me, you might even find yourself yearning for the next time you get to work on your ‘thing’, giving you something to look forward to.

In every case, you’ve made progress on an important task before you’ve become reactive. Block the time out on your calendar (be bullish!) so you’re not disturbed, and go for it!

I’m inclined to thing that this is an advanced technique, so I’m interested in finding out how this works for others. Leave a comment and let me know!