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Scott H Young

How to Get More Time to SleepDecember 2

Do you get enough sleep?

If six hours is a normal night’s sleep, and you’re addicted to coffee just to wake up in the morning, the answer is probably no.

What I often find surprising is how many people miss sleep, without any need to.  Some people have a legitimate reason for not getting enough sleep.  New parents will have a hard time sleeping eight, uninterrupted hours a day.  But for most people, there is an opportunity for sleep, but sleep is made a low priority.

Example: The All-Night Exam Cram

It’s December, and that means exams for many students.  And with exams, comes the Red Bull induced, 4 a.m. study sessions.  Some students take this approach to an extreme, staying up all night to study for an exam the next day.

This isn’t productive.  Studying isn’t manual labor, it’s brain work.  Sleep is connected with the learning process, and missing hours of sleep doesn’t help you study.  Worse, if you’re skipping sleep the day before an exam, the tiredness will hurt you more than missing a few hours of studying.

Make Sleep a Priority

All of this lost sleep is the result of a myth.  This myth says that the work you accomplish is a direct result of

Friday Links 08-11-28November 28

From the Web

Holistic Learning for Math - Cal Newport has an excellent article about how to do well in technical courses like math or physics.  He focuses on developing what he calls “insightful studying”, however I think his approach fits nicely with holistic learning.  Cal’s emphasis isn’t on memorization, but on breaking down all the details to their core, so you understand them intuitively.  A must read.

The Argument Against Batching - I’ve frequently mentioned batching as one of my top productivity tips.  Here’s a contrasting view.  I think batching is one of those tricks that can be taken too far.  You can also view my response in the comments.

Review Me at People Jam - People Jam is a great site where people can review personal development information.  If you’ve been reading the website for awhile, I’d really appreciate if you made a review and rating.  Sign-up takes only a few seconds, and you can also weigh your opinion on many other blogs.

From the Archives

The Value of Independence

There are few virtues more important

Boost Productivity With a To-Don’t ListNovember 26

To-do lists are a common productivity tool.  They help you stay focused and clarify what needs to be done.  However, just as important as writing a list of things you need to do, you need to write a list of things to stop doing.

Why Adding More Work Doesn’t Make You Productive

If you’re really disorganized and lack motivation, then you can spend time trying to increase your total output.  So if you’re currently outputting 2 hours of productive work each day, it isn’t unreasonable to push that up to 4, 6 or higher.  But this approach of taking on more work eventually reaches a stopping point.

When you’re already fairly productive, you can’t simply add on more work.  Adding more work might make you get more done in the short term, but eventually you burn out.  Once you reach this point, the only way to get more progress towards your goals is to stop doing work.

To-Don’t Lists

I’m not going to make recommendations to cut your email usage, surf the net less or eliminate busy-work.  Those are all useful suggestions, but they don’t really get at the heart of what makes a to-don’t list powerful.  You should always try to reduce low-value work, but to-don’t lists help you eliminate something harder to stop.

The work that is harder to stop is work that has some value, in the short-term, but won’t help you reach your final goal.  Today, the work might be helpful, but it isn’t going to help you reach your go

Self-AwarenessNovember 24

I think the biggest key to productivity (and all self-improvement) is one that doesn’t get talked about: knowing what makes you tick.  Being organized and having a great day planner is great, but it doesn’t get things done.  Self-awareness allows you to work around your weaknesses.

Self-awareness is a lofty word thrown around so often it’s started to lose meaning.  I’d like to focus on practical self-awareness, namely:

• Why you do what you do.
• More importantly, why do you fail to do what you set out to do.

I like to emphasize the last point because I get a lot of reader feedback about it.  Many emails I get start with the person describing all the things they’ve failed to accomplish.  The intention is definitely there, and in many cases, the will is there too.  But something is holding them back.

I don’t want to sound preachy about this, because everyday I go through the exact same process.  I accomplish some things, but often I fail to do the things I want to do.  I think the dividing line between achievers and non-achievers is that achievers recognize those failures, find the underlying problems, and figure out how to work around them.

Frequent Hiccups are More Dangerous Than Huge Mistakes

Blogging friend Ben Casnocha has said that he doesn’t like to ask a person about their “biggest failures”.  Instead, he likes to ask th

How to Nap (Without Feeling Exhausted Afterwards)November 20

Do you ever take a nap and wake up exhausted?  I recently was given two unscientific, but still useful tips for avoiding post-nap exhaustion.

1. Don’t nap for more than 20 minutes at a time.
2. Nap with a spoon in your right hand.

For the first tip, I’m sure to get a bunch of comments that say the actual number should be 30 or 45, or 13 minutes.  I don’t really care.  Twenty has been a useful number for me, so I’m offering it.

The second tip needs a little explanation.  If you sleep with a spoon in your hand, it’s important to make sure that hand is off the bed (or couch, chair, futon or whatever your napping hideout is).  Then, if you slip into deeper sleep, you’ll drop the spoon and wake up.  This helps you avoid slipping into the deeper phases of sleep which seem to contribute to post-nap fatigue if you interrupt them early.

Of course, this raises the questions of whether naps are even useful to begin with.  I’m a fan of regular 8-hour sleep and emergency-only napping.  Thomas Edison, however, believed in sleeping only a few hours each night and chronic napping.