Update & Notes on the Sleep Video (Patreon)

I know I've been a bit inconsistent with the Patreon page. I really appreciate the support. The money is great and helps me afford to spend more time on this and buy more books (Just dropped 100 bucks at Half Price books in Austin, TX before coming back to Japan) , but more importantly it's very motivating to know that the content has been compelling enough that y'all are willing to contribute to my page. It's just me working on the videos and they take a long time, so this kind of motivation is really important for me. Thank you again.

I'm still working on getting the videos out at regular intervals, but I'm going to post on here as much as I can as well. 

Notes on the Sleep Video:
While I was at my recruiting job, my aim was to just output as much as possible and the work was relatively straight forward so I didn't notice how sleep was affecting me. [Wake up at 5AM, exercise, coffee, go to work, answer emails, make phone calls, coffee, go to meetings, draft contracts, make phone calls, coffee, write emails, coffee, more contracts, get home at 10PM, watch Netflix, go to sleep around 12PM] After a while it became straightforward enough that I could do it on semi-autopilot. I obviously didn't feel as good with less sleep but I figured as long as I was awake and working I was being more productive. 

Then, I got into this and approached it with a slightly more relaxed attitude (as I knew too rigid of an approach wasn't conducive to creativty) but didn't prioritize sleep. By this point I was more mindful in general and very aware of what thoughts I was thinking, how I was acting, how I was performing differently from yesterday and so on. I started to realize "Wow, I'm like a drunk person when I haven't slept enough." One day after poor sleep I found myself looking for my coffee scoop for about 10 minutes only to realize I threw it in the trash along with something else. Then I went to the station and was thinking "Where the hell is the chuo-line?" but the chuo line is the line I take after taking the train to another station.  I wasn't a bumbling idiot staggering around with my eyes half closed, I actually felt pretty sharp, but I would just have these brief moments of "What the hell am I doing?". Despite feeling OK, I wasn't acting OK and I could only realize that I wasn't at 100% until after I had one of these brain-lags.  (This is what I was getting at at 7:56  in the sleep video )

Sometimes when I’m reading something out of a book, if there was an interesting part that I don’t want to forget, then I will type that passage out verbatim on google docs.  This makes easy to find later and at the same time (I hope) it serves as practice to improve my typing speed. When I haven't slept well, I've noticed that I type a bit slower and have to spend more time hitting the delete button. So even when I don’t have to think at all about what I’m typing, I am making these small mistakes and typing slower in general. Then I'm even slower when I'm trying to come up with good examples or figuring out how lay pieces of information out into a compelling narrative. Basically I realized that if I'm sacrificing sleep to squeeze another hour out of the day, it's pointless if my productivity has slowed down to 85% capacity.

Arianna Huffington's "The Sleep Revolution" was annoyingly dense with statistics and research results, but it did drive home to me how widespread poor sleep is. If statistics and statements like Sleep deprivation “adds up to more than eleven days of lost productivity per year per worker.” really speak to you, then I recommend checking that one out. However, David Randall's "Dreamland" was a much more interesting read and talks a bit more the mechanisms behind sleep. If you want more practical and actionable advice, Shawn Stevenson's book "Sleep Smarter" is quite good. 

Attached is the script for the video and some of the words are hyperlinked to the references I was using