You can break up a day into three separate eight-hour shifts. We typically devote one shift to work, one shift to life, and one shift to sleep (assuming you sleep 8 hours a night). I was just reading Cranking Widgets’s Why I Sometimes Choose Living Over Sleeping. Brett Kelly has a good point in stating that he chooses life over sleep. He does provide good reasons why he would willingly forego sleep; I am guilty of some of those as well.
I do want to add to his thoughts with the following. If we go on the three shift concept, it means that we devote one third of our lives to sleep. If we live to age eighty, that means that we would have slept a bit less than twenty seven years. That’s twenty seven years of unconsciousness! There is some variance, of course. We have some people, like myself, devote about six hours of sleep per night. Others devote closer to ten hours of sleep per night.
My reason for giving up on sleep is that most bosses will be damned if they don’t get a full shift or more out of you. Thus far, I can’t say that I have found a career that I find fulfilling. I’ll do the job and work hard, but the jobs I’ve done don’t define who I am. It’s just a way to earn money. So, in order for me to pursue my personal interests, such as blogging, podcasting, and tinkering with technology, I have to use the other two shifts. My jobs thus far have nothing to do with my interests. My family doesn’t appreciate me using their time, which is often also infringed upon by work. So, that leaves me precious few hours after they are asleep to pursue my interests. The choice to me is, like it is to Brett Kelly, quite clear. ‘Tis better to miss a few winks than to live an unfulfilled life.
Somehow, we are able to cut our hours for living and hours for sleep short. The hours for work, however, rarely go below and frequently go above their fair share. Given such an imbalance, the choice literally is between life and sleep. I’m sure you’ve heard some hard living people say that they will get enough sleep when they die. If I stick to my trend of sleeping about six hours per night, I’ll have taken back seven years of living! The only thing to beware is squandering those seven extra years on pointless endeavors.
