Around a week and a half ago, I was at lunch with some people from my team. I’m not sure what path our conversation took, but somehow we started talking about using alarms to wake up in the morning. Specifically, I mentioned that I had been using Sleep Cycle to help me wake up. I said that I’d been using it for a few months and had found that I had indeed been waking up feeling less groggy, but I wasn’t sure if the app was really working or if I just wanted it to work. It could well be that it’s all in my head, and the app has nothing to do with it beyond being a placebo.
This prompted someone to mention that they never used alarms to wake up, and just let nature take its course. Sleep when you feel like sleeping and wake up when you naturally wake up. As soon as I heard it, I was quick to respond saying “that may work for you, but there’s no way in hell it’s going to work for me”. A little bit of history about my sleeping patterns would help here, so I’ll take the quick detour.
Back when I was in high school, living at home with my parents, I hated waking up in the morning (not much has changed since). I also however, used to hate staying up at night (this has changed completely). I absolutely needed at least 8 to 10 hours of sleep a day. I simply could not function otherwise. Fortunately for me, my father made a regular habit of getting me out of bed early in the morning, so that I had enough time during the day to get my studying done. He used to keep telling me something he learned early in life from his boss:
You can find a thousand good reasons to not wake up every morning. But, you only need one good reason to wake up: you want to.
Every time I hear my alarm go off and I just want to turn it off and go back to sleep, I can hear my father saying this to me and I get out of bed. I’m not sure what I’d be doing today if not for his and my mother’s super human efforts to wake me up every morning for four years. Then, I came to college and miraculously, I had no problems functioning on 4 hours of sleep or less for up to a week or so. Obviously, I consumed insane amounts of caffeine and probably reduced my lifespan by a few years. After getting out of college I realized that I was going down a self-destructive path, and decided to sleep more, more regularly, and reduce my caffeine intake (and with it the terrible beverages that contained the caffeine). Since my entrance into the “Real World”, I typically sleep somewhere between 6 to 7 hours on a week night, and 8 to 12 on Saturday/Sunday.
In any event, going back to the conversation, I scoffed at the idea of not using alarms to wake up and dismissed it as something for people not like me. This led to the person who brought it up to challenge me to try not using alarms for a week to see how things go. Not being one to back down from a challenge, I accepted. Thus came about my week long experiment of not using an alarm to wake up. Starting Friday, February 25th 2012, I decided to not use an alarm for a week. Here’re the results of this experiment:
As you can see, I ended up sleeping more on average, and the difference in hours of sleep on a week night vs a week end night isn’t a whole lot. So in terms of sleeping better, I think this experiment worked out great. I now know that I won’t be sleeping 12 hours a day if I don’t force myself to wake up in 6. In terms of how energetic I felt each morning coming in to work, there wasn’t a whole lot of difference. Without an alarm, I definitely woke up feeling way more refreshed, and didn’t have to drag myself out of bed and go through my morning routine in a daze. But, one of the advantages of being a little sleep deprived when I wake up, is that as soon as I get on the bus, I’m fast asleep. When I get off the bus in Cupertino, I’ve just woken up from a one hour-ish nap feeling great. Throw in the cup of coffee I drink as soon as I get to my desk, and I’m in pretty good shape at the start of my work day. When I sleep 8 hours at night, I end up not being able to sleep on the bus. Since I’ve had enough sleep though, I’m still in good shape when I begin working.
But, the times at which I woke up each morning were pretty different. The nice thing about working on my team is that you have a lot of flexibility in terms of when you work. Really, all you need to do is make sure you’re present at meetings. Beyond that, you can work whenever you want to. This means that when I wake up shouldn’t really have an impact on my daily life. Unfortunately, since I live in San Francisco but work in Cupertino, that’s not true. Given how far my home and office are, I’d like to use the shuttle to commute every day instead of having to drive. This means that my schedule is pretty heavily determined by the shuttle schedule. It turns out that the shuttle schedule is nowhere near as flexible as I’d like it to be. So, my wake up time being off by 5 minutes could mean I waste a lot more time than that. For instance, if I don’t make it to the bus stop by 8:55 AM, I end up arriving at work at 10:45 AM (sometimes 11:45 AM) instead of 10:00 AM. Even if I can be at the bus stop at 9:00 AM. Since the bus doesn’t run all that late (the last one leaves at 9:15 PM), losing the time is simply not worth it. What also really works against me is the fact that I can do just about nothing useful on the bus. I get motion sick pretty easily, so I can’t read, write, or watch video while I’m on the bus. So I end up listening to a podcast, or sleeping with some music on. If I can’t sleep on the bus, it’s pretty much time wasted looking at a seat back.
Therefore, given my schedule, I’ve decided to go back to using Sleep Cycle for the time being. But, I still consider this experiment to be a success. I would definitely like to adopt the no alarm way of life. Once I move closer to work and my schedule becomes more flexible, I intend to go back to it. It also serves as a reminder of what Jason F said in this post over at 37 Signals:
So next time you hear something, or someone, talk about an idea, pitch an idea, or suggest an idea, give it five minutes. Think about it a little bit before pushing back, before saying it’s too hard or it’s too much work.