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time to experiment with getting more sleep
Part way thorough my PhD program I decided to start tracking how I was spending my hours, and set up a spreadsheet to keep track of half a dozen categories
*uni work
*exercise
*reading/e-mail/livejournal/etc. or, more rarely, watching a movie, play or concert
*useful tasks
*social
*sleep
looking back over the graph most of these categories have very wavy lines--up one month, down the next. There is only one category which shows a consistent downward trend, and that is sleep. The first four months of my record I averaged more than 8 hours of sleep every night. Then spring arrived, and I started getting less sleep each night, with the average dropping to right on, or only barely below, 8 hours/night for the next 7 months. Then I hit the need-to-finish-the-thesis-ASAP crunch, and sleep dropped to only about 7.5 hours/month (other than the month I finished, where it dropped to less than 6.5 hours/night average for the whole month (keep in mind that half of that month was thesis finishing, the other half was traveling, and I am pretty certain that I got more sleep while traveling, so the low was certainly even lower than that!). Since finishing my thesis a year ago and moving to Milan I've been averaging between 7.2 and 7.6 hours of sleep/night (looking at the totals for each month as a whole).
This explains why I've generally got dark circles under my eyes, and now I'm wondering if I'd have better luck keeping my hours of uni work/week as high as I want it to be if I were getting more sleep. Therefore I'm going to try an experiment--with a new month starting in a couple of days, I'm going to see if I can push my average hours of sleep for August to (or even over) 8 hours/day, just to see what it does to my energy levels and uni work. This will be an interesting month to try this because I'll be traveling for part of it, and when I'm not traveling it will likely be way hot, which could interfere with my being able to sleep at all. I'll try to remember to report back on the topic at the end of the month.
In other news, it was a lovely day today--it rained this morning, and never got hot all day. I was able to walk to the store which carries the cheese I like (a 30 minute walk, each way), and the cheese, butter and yoghurt was all still nice and cool when I got it out of my backpack when I got home!
Today's uni progress report: Started a word document for a paper that will summarize the results of my research here, using a paper written by my predecessor as a template (at my boss'es suggestion), filled in a bit of data in bullet points in the outline, then spent some time processing data. Confirmed that the experiment that I'd started before leaving and which had the heat turned off just before I left had, in fact, been re-heated and it is going fine--we should be able to download that one next week. Booked time for the microprobe for the following week to analyze that experiment.
Now it is nearly midnight, and I still need to read my 1000 words of geologic literature and do my yoga before bed, so if I want to get more sleep I'm either going to have to sleep in in the morning, or get a nap at some point...
*uni work
*exercise
*reading/e-mail/livejournal/etc. or, more rarely, watching a movie, play or concert
*useful tasks
*social
*sleep
looking back over the graph most of these categories have very wavy lines--up one month, down the next. There is only one category which shows a consistent downward trend, and that is sleep. The first four months of my record I averaged more than 8 hours of sleep every night. Then spring arrived, and I started getting less sleep each night, with the average dropping to right on, or only barely below, 8 hours/night for the next 7 months. Then I hit the need-to-finish-the-thesis-ASAP crunch, and sleep dropped to only about 7.5 hours/month (other than the month I finished, where it dropped to less than 6.5 hours/night average for the whole month (keep in mind that half of that month was thesis finishing, the other half was traveling, and I am pretty certain that I got more sleep while traveling, so the low was certainly even lower than that!). Since finishing my thesis a year ago and moving to Milan I've been averaging between 7.2 and 7.6 hours of sleep/night (looking at the totals for each month as a whole).
This explains why I've generally got dark circles under my eyes, and now I'm wondering if I'd have better luck keeping my hours of uni work/week as high as I want it to be if I were getting more sleep. Therefore I'm going to try an experiment--with a new month starting in a couple of days, I'm going to see if I can push my average hours of sleep for August to (or even over) 8 hours/day, just to see what it does to my energy levels and uni work. This will be an interesting month to try this because I'll be traveling for part of it, and when I'm not traveling it will likely be way hot, which could interfere with my being able to sleep at all. I'll try to remember to report back on the topic at the end of the month.
In other news, it was a lovely day today--it rained this morning, and never got hot all day. I was able to walk to the store which carries the cheese I like (a 30 minute walk, each way), and the cheese, butter and yoghurt was all still nice and cool when I got it out of my backpack when I got home!
Today's uni progress report: Started a word document for a paper that will summarize the results of my research here, using a paper written by my predecessor as a template (at my boss'es suggestion), filled in a bit of data in bullet points in the outline, then spent some time processing data. Confirmed that the experiment that I'd started before leaving and which had the heat turned off just before I left had, in fact, been re-heated and it is going fine--we should be able to download that one next week. Booked time for the microprobe for the following week to analyze that experiment.
Now it is nearly midnight, and I still need to read my 1000 words of geologic literature and do my yoga before bed, so if I want to get more sleep I'm either going to have to sleep in in the morning, or get a nap at some point...