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.

This is going to be an experiment in less.

• Less stuff
• Less distraction
• Less mental chatter

It could also be an experiment in more. More focus, more pleasure, more clarity. The first is the work that has to be done and the second is the result of that effort.

This is what it looks like:

1. Less stuff: I’m going to pare down my stuff over the course of six months. I’ve already gone through the Marie Kondo technique, but I’m going to go further. I still get the feeling that I’m distracted by all of my possessions.

2. Less distraction: This is what I originally envisioned for this blog. A way to help people be more productive and successful by focusing on what was important. Separating the urgent from the important and creating successful habits

3. Less mental chatter: Learning to be more present and mentally quiet. Meditation and developing daily rituals to promote creativity.

There is so much stuff in our lives. Whether it is the flotsam and jetsam of our physical possessions or it’s the advertisements and click holes that clutter our email inboxes. My goal is to explore ways to clear these out and to create space for creativity, relationships, and presence.

It’s my journey, but I’m going to share it with you — just in case it provides some value. There is nothing better than learning from someone else’s mistakes! I’m sure you have experienced clutter in one (if not all) of these areas. Join me while I simplify and peel back the layers until I have room to breathe again…

Every productivity blog talks about morning rituals. I’m not going to jump on the bandwagon and say, “Yay, morning rituals — do them!”. It’s not quite that easy. No matter what anyone tells you, like everything else that’s good for you and takes sacrifice, morning rituals require willpower and discipline. But as all of my gurus say: Your morning sets your day, which sets your week, which sets your year, which sets your life (or something like that).

During grad school, I waited tables at a restaurant famous for their breakfasts. I had to be at work by 6 AM. I’ve never been a morning person. In retrospect, it kind of amazes me that I got any tips at all. Friends would ponder my decision to work early mornings as I spilled coffee and grumped about. I’d never been one of those happy, smiling kids eating their Cheerios every morning. Getting up any earlier than absolutely necessary didn’t seem to be in my DNA. How did I turn into an early bird?

Part 1: Forming a habit

My morning ritual started off with a bet. I really wanted to keep a journal but for some reason couldn’t do it. I’m sure it goes back to someone reading my diary or something when I was eight. I couldn’t do it. Finally, I asked a workmate (yes, a workmate) to be my accountability partner. I set myself up in Stickk and set my non-compliance punishment (I would donate money to some right-wing fascist organization), and we were off! I wrote in my journal for ten minutes on my morning bus ride. When I got to work, Nicole looked at my journal to make sure there was some writing, and then she checked a box on Stikk. After a month, I was hooked, my habit had formed. Mission accomplished.

Do something every day for thirty days — even if you don’t want to.

Part 2: Getting up early

I’ve been trying to meditate off and on for many years. I’d taken classes, set aside time at work, and made a special little corner in my apartment. No luck. One day over coffee, my friend Weaver told me to get my ass out of bed fifteen minutes early and just to it!

When you’re blatantly challenged, as opposed to passive aggressively challenged, it’s hard to ignore. What’s fifteen minutes after all? So I got up fifteen minutes early and meditated for ten minutes. And then I found that I wanted to meditate longer, so I got up twenty minutes earlier. Turns out that if you take baby steps, it’s not that hard to get up a little early.

My morning routine these days is rock solid. I do it every weekday and a modified version while I’m on vacation. There are areas I need to work on (my weekend routine), but my mornings get me energized and centered for the rest of my day.

Start small and build the habit. Add to your routine incrementally until it’s second nature. You’re the only one who will know when you’ve nailed it.

Getting started in five easy steps:

1. Decide the one small thing that will really kick-start your day.
2. Determine how long it will take.
3. Set your alarm X + 5 minutes early (get X from #2 above and add five minutes).
4. Do it.
5. Repeat.

If you need it, get an accountability buddy (or use one of the thousands of tools out there). You can even try the Seinfeld technique.

My morning ritual and your morning ritual will be different. That’s okay. Morning rituals changes over time; that’s also okay. As with everything in life, there’s an ebb and flow to what will work and what won’t. That’s where you get to be creative. That’s what makes life interesting — we’re all different and we all respond differently.

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!

I’m in a unique position. I’ve been working with a technical writing team that wants me to join them. They know my skill level, and they know that I want to make this career change. It should be a done deal.

I work at an unusual (and highly regarded) company. They have checks and balances in place to ensure the integrity and quality of their workforce remains top notch. This means that I have to go through the complete hiring process before joining my new team.

The complete hiring process includes:

1. A writing portfolio
2. Four interviews
3. Letters of support from past and future managers
4. A review by a hiring committee

I’m waiting to be reviewed by the committee.

I’ve spent the last month putting together a portfolio and preparing for interviews. I finished my fourth interview this week. This was difficult. I am stuck in the proverbial chicken and egg situation — I need more technical writing experience to get the job where I’d get more technical writing experience. So here I am…

Since I’d rather be writing. Here’s my new blog schedule:

• Film Friday: The first and third Friday of the month, I’ll publish something that excites me about — you guessed it, film. I’ll cross-post to Gypsy Cinema.
• Tech-Writer Tuesday: The second and fourth Tuesday, I’ll publish new tidbits that I’ve learned or am learning about my new career in technical communication.
• Sunday Staples: I needed an alliteration that’d give me a chance to fill in the blank. Every other Sunday, I’ll write about things that I’m interested in.

Six posts a month is pretty aggressive, but Chris Brogan says to set goals that are challenging yet still fit your mission. Goal set.

Now to do the work.

It stifled my enthusiasm. Just an amateur with a small blog with a couple of readers. Waiting for the screening of Spy, I could hear the reporters behind me lamenting that they were going to miss Deathgasm because they needed to write up this film. They were snotty and annoying. I was happy when a retired parks designer from Sacramento sat down next to me. He really liked Love and Mercy — he thought that I’d like it too.

I really valued his opinion. I went to see Love and Mercy and left thinking it could very well be the best movie of the festival. I don’t know what the professional reviewers thought about the film. I cared what the guy sitting next to me thought of the film. We weren’t professionals, but we knew what films we liked. It was fun talking with him.

It’s how you relate to a film that matters. I like films that convey complex emotions and ideas — either the characters, the story, or the cinematography. I like beauty. I don’t have hands on experience making films or as a film critic. I do know what I like and that, it turns out, is important.

I really liked the film Manglehorn. Written by Paul Logan and David Gordon Green especially for Al Pacino. It starred Al Pacino and Holly Hunter. David Gordon Green directed a gentle movie about loss, acceptance, and moving on. Al Pacino gave a subtle and moving performance. Holly Hunter was vulnerable and bright, the film was a touching portrait of loss, acceptance, and moving on. I loved it.

The critics either loved or were indifferent about Manglehorn. If I had made my film viewing choice based upon Peter Debruge’s review in Variety rather than listening to the Austin couple standing next to me in line, I would have missed out on a subtle and beautiful film.

I’m the intended audience of the film. I’m the person who pays (or doesn’t) to see a movie. I love films with all their imperfections. There’s someone else like me, who might care about film the way I care about film. A person who wants to know if they should pay for this film or wait to stream it on Netflix. Someone like me.

“Everyone’s a critic”, the saying goes. I’d argue that the best thing is a “professional” film review is the historical and social context. I care about what you think

The only thing I care about in a “professional” film review is comparisons to other films and historical context. I love thinking about and comparing artists.

I care about what regular people think about films. In the end, the film is for you and your opinion is important. Go watch movies, write about movies, and talk about movies. They’re being made for you and the person standing in line next to you cares about what you think!