Just an anecdote today as I slog once again through a tired, sick, but working day.
Several years ago, when I was first teaching game design, I had a student who was desperate to get his game done and out into the world. So focused on his vision this student was, so overcome with the compulsion to work long nights, that he went all-in on his game, to the point that he missed a few classes.
When I started to wonder about him, I asked his roommate who was also in the class how the student was doing. I found out that he was coding so hard, working so many hours, that he wasn’t sleeping. He also wasn’t eating other than snacks, and he wasn’t drinking enough. He… passed out. He had to go to the hospital, where he was put on an IV to re-hydrate and sleep.
After he got back to school, I made his new homework assignment this: drink Gatorade while coding, go to sleep at no later than 1 am. I had to explain to him a simple truth: we get the false sense that staying awake and powering through work is the right answer, but there’s a point (and it’s not the same for everyone, but it’s in the same sort of general range–more than a full day awake plus/minus 10 hours) where we become so tired that we don’t function well enough to make the hours of extra work “worth” it. There’s a point– for me it’s after I’ve been awake about 30 hours– where another hour of sleepy work has the value of about 20-30 minutes of “well rested work.” I have come up with that number by monitoring myself while working at game jams, which is not super-scientific, but it seems consistent with my all-nighters in college, and I couldn’t do that sort of all-hours work at all in grad school, which led to me sleeping well into the day after my late-night research sessions.
So one of the important college/life skills I try to instill in my students is to find the point where extra hours of work no longer hold the value that post-sleep hours would hold. I know to a small degree this is faulty logic, and I also know that I should probably encourage my students to have a healthy sleep schedule even if it cuts into their work, but I also know the students at Miami well enough to know that if I present it to them as an optimization, I’ll have better luck.
At the end of the day, we all need more sleep. No pun intended. But looking at how many people are sick right now, how many people I see who are battling their stress, one of the easy answers is getting good rest. When you run a machine on low batteries over and over and over, it starts to lose capacity. I hope we aren’t the same, but… I think we are.
Get some rest!