Over-Caffeinated and Under-Slept

[This has been cross-posted to The Farm]

There’s just too much interesting stuff to do, and as a result I’ve

been over-caffeinating and under-sleeping. The end result is that

although I’m spending more time coding or learning some new

programming

tools and techniques (and with closures, Laszlo, Cocoa, all kinds of

ideas for Blogware and so on, there’s no shortage) as well as doing

some non-geeky reading, I’m actually getting less coding and learning

done.

I already knew that getting a good night’s sleep was essential to

being

productive, but it really hit me while reading the foreword to Aaron

Hillegass’ book, Cocoa Programming for Mac OS

X.

In it, he offers a bit of advice that I’ve never seen in any other

programming book: that getting eight hours’ sleep is important. He

goes

so far as to say that when learning something new and complex, one

should get ten hours’ sleep. He caps off the advice with a fact that

many of us know, but ignore:

So that’s my plan for the next little while: to stop fighting the urge

to read “just one more chapter” or “just one more web site” or do

“just

one more thing” and get some proper shut-eye. I’ve been doing it for

the past couple of days and already feel a little sharper.