Time is not the bottleneck (on making progress thinking about difficult things)

There is a book "Daily Rituals" by Mason Currey which looks at the practices of various high achievers. Few were able to achieve much more than 4 hours a day of sustained high calibre intellectual work*. This suggests to me that going much past this is difficult as you would think others who could work harder would do so and win. 

A typical day would look like this

1. Hard work in the morning for 4-5 hours with coffee or breakfast. 
2. Lunch then take care of business. 
3. Relax in the evening.

A nap at lunchtime can help you to eke out another hour or so (as in thar study of violinists who made it to become concert solists - which I can't find right now). Personally I now see sleep not as wasted time but as a useful practice that helps me to learn and to exercise hard or to deal with emotionally challenging situations from the present or the past.

I think people should focus on getting in the 4 hours a day, which is hard enough. If you do that in a goal directed fashion you are likely to be awesome. And the good news is that you can also manage your life and enjoy yourself.

* Note we are not talking about busy work or repetitive work. If there is not a feeling of effort you are probably not working very hard. One example of hard work is deliberate practice. 

Your question resonates strongly with me.  About ten years ago, I decided to try Uberman to solve exactly this problem.  While it didn't solve the problem, it taught me a lot about sleep, and it was worth three weeks of hell for that alone.

In the time since then, I've come to the conclusion that it's probably not that sleep recharges our available mental energy.  Recharging is part of it, but I think a bigger factor is probably the fact that sleep provides memory consolidation, and most importantly, sleep makes us forget things.  We are able to make progress in the morning at least in part because after a good nights rest, things feel new and interesting.  We have insights, see things in a different light, because we're partially relearning things we knew previously, and adding another layer of paint onto the picture.  In the morning, we've probably forgotten why we got bored the previous day.

With this in mind, I've tried things like working on one project in the morning, then switching to a completely orthogonal project in the afternoon, then another completely orthogonal project in the evening.  It's easier to be excited about things when the things you learned in the morning don't interfere with the things you're trying to learn later on.  This worked great for me during the Covid lockdowns, when I learned a lot of biochemistry in the evenings, after spending my mornings doing computer related work.

That said, while switching to completely different projects helps, it's still not great.  There's still an energy loss, an inability to care, an apathy to overcome.  If I didn't have work constraints, I would probably try to switch to a polyphasic schedule again to test or verify some of the above;  based on what I've learned over the years, my next attempt would be a balanced triphasic schedule.  This would put me at 6-6.5 hours awake and 1.5-2 hours asleep, with each six hour 'awake' block being a separate topic/category.

You talk about the length of your sleep but have you considered variability of your sleep? For me sleeping always 7h30 seems to greatly increase my productivity in the long run. I sometimes add a few sleep cycle every few week ends but try to stick to a regular sleep schedule instead of thinking in terms of duration.

You might want to try by first waking up always at the same time, regardless of when you fell asleep.

I think this is pretty well known among people interested in optimizing for higher productivity. I can't think of any specific examples to link you to now, but people keep rediscovering this point that time != energy/willpower/etc. and that not all hours of the day, week, month, or year are fungible.

I think the real shame is we don't tell kids about this fact when they become teenagers and have to start thinking about this stuff (or maybe we do and I was just too thick to get it!).

im very interested in things in this domain. its interesting that you correctly note that uberman-sleep isn't a solution, and naps don't quite cut it, so your suggested/implied synthesis/middle-ground of something like "polyphasic but with much more sleep per sleep-time-slice" is very interesting. 

given this post is now 2 years old, how did this work out for you? 


in a similar or perhaps more fundamental framing, the goal is to be able to effectively "reset"; to reattain if possible that morning/new-day magic. to this end, the only thing ive found that even comes close to the natural reset of sleep is a shower/bath. in a pinch, washing/dunking the head/face in water can work, but less well. for this reason I often take two showers a day. usually the pattern is: walk+workout, shower, work, get tired, walk outside for 30ish minutes, shower, work some more. the magic isn't fully restored for that second session, but more than if i just walk without the shower. 

if the 'full magic' of true/natural morning can get me 4 hours of Hard Work, then the shower-reset can maybe give me another 30mins to an hour. more work is performed than just Hard Work, but I think you know what I mean.

some people will say workouts/exercise help, but for me they don't in themselves. ie, in the more natural setting of "part of the normal waking up and/or general health routine", of course exercise is a must. but from this framing of "how to get more of the morning/new-day magic", i've found more exercise is counterproductive. even trying to just shift around *when in the day* the exercise is done is counterproductively draining for me; morning is best. not to mention that delaying the workout is a great way to never actually workout since i don't really want to do it at all; the chance i do it at all is maximized in the morning. 

Adderall.