The release was in two weeks.
So you made a trade.
Bed after midnight,
up at six,
every night until it shipped.
The first three days
were hard.
Heavy eyes,
coffee at ten,
a headache by four.
Then it got easier.
By the second week
you felt more or less normal.
A bit flat.
Nothing a person
would call tired.
You concluded
you had adapted.
You had not.
You had stopped
being able to tell.
In 2003
Hans Van Dongen,
David Dinges
and colleagues
kept people in a laboratory
for two weeks.
Some were allowed
eight hours in bed a night.
Some six.
Some four.
Another group
was kept awake completely
for three nights.
Every day
they took a simple test.
Watch a screen,
press a button
when a light appears.
Count the moments
you are too slow.
The eight hour group
stayed steady.
The six hour group
got worse,
day after day,
and never levelled out.
By the end of the two weeks
their lapses matched people
who had been kept awake
for a whole night.
The four hour group
matched two nights.
And here is the part
that should worry you.
When they were asked
how sleepy they felt,
the six hour group's answer
rose in the first few days
and then flattened.
Their performance kept falling.
Their sense of it
did not.
They felt
a little tired.
They were working
like people
who had not been to bed.
So the feeling
you rely on
to tell you when to stop
is the one thing
that stops working.
Which means
you cannot plan a crunch
by how you feel.
Plan it by the clock.
If the schedule
only works on six hours a night,
the schedule is wrong,
not the night.
Keep the work
that cannot afford a lapse,
the migration,
the production change,
the review of the risky diff,
for the mornings
after a proper night.
Ask someone rested
to check what you did
on day eleven.
And when you say
you are used to it,
remember what used to it
was measuring.
Not the damage.
Only the complaint.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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