105 hours: 9 hours a day for sleep

I use a set of tactics and principles to manage my time. I call it 105 hours.

It helps me allocate the 105 hours I have in the week.

A week has 168 hours total, so 105 available hours means allocating 9 hours a day, or 63 hours total, to sleep.

TV shows and sleep

I've binged many TV shows in the past. Ozark, Billions, and This is Us were some of the latest favorites.

I watched This is Us with my wife not too long ago. [Spoiler alert] We were watching the final season; Rebecca is lying on her deathbed, and the big three are together with the extended family and grandkids. She walks through a metaphorical train to the other side, meeting everyone that parted earlier in the show. She finally meets her lovely husband, Jack, on the train's last caboose.

Tears go down our faces that we didn't know could fit inside our little tear glands and ducts. We turn off the TV and go to bed. A quick check at the watch: it's 2:00 am. Yes, we had just binged on this last season of This is Us all day today, but we just had to see how it ended!

We go to bed, but it will take a little while for our brains to relax and get sleepy. My wife picks up her phone to catch up on social media, and I pick up a kindle paperwhite, which I'll likely still be holding when I fall asleep in bed. I won't retain anything I read.

And shoot, it turns out that that wasn't even the show's last episode! There was one more after that! Can you believe it?? What else could still happen!? We watch it the following night, going to sleep slightly late – not 2:00 am late, but late nonetheless.

Books and sleep

Fast forward a few years later. I'm reading Science Fiction, a recent thing I got into, having finally learned how to read novels. Neal Stephenson is the author du jour, with Cryptonomicon and Reamde as some of my favorites.

Goto Dengo, one of Cryptonomicon's Japanese protagonists, has just met Randy Waterhouse for an exclusive dinner. After exchanging pleasantries, Randy subtly conveys that he knows where the gold is buried, having broken the code for its location by building, in the 50s, an innovative computer with pipes and mercury. He says he has the exact longitude and latitude coordinates of where it is.

Goto Dengo is suspicious and says that if he has the exact coordinates, he can write just their last four digits on a piece of paper, the coordinate's minutes and seconds, and they'll compare numbers. It won't reveal anything if they don't know the exact location, but the digits will be identical if they both have the same information.

Randy Waterhouse gets a pen, writes down the number, and hands it over. Goto Dengo, generally a sober old man, can hardly contain his expression of surprise and disbelief when he sees the digits, matching precisely the ones he wrote! Randy has broken the code!

At this point, my wristwatch's alarm rings – 11:00 pm, bedtime. Maybe I'll read a few more paragraphs and wrap up this section, but I've been reading for 2 hours, and I'm honestly feeling pretty sleepy.

A few minutes later, I head to bed. My wife hears me and heads over as well. We turn off the lights a few minutes later, chat for a bit, and maybe at around 11:20 pm or 11:30 pm, we're all sound asleep: my wife, I, and a handful of cats.

I'll wake up the following day at around 7:30 am, and by 8:00 am, I will be ready to start my day by going for a run.

Every day, the 9 hours between 11:00 pm and 8:00 am are dedicated to going to sleep, sleeping, waking up, and getting ready for the first activity of the day.

The "sleeper" alarm

Matthew Walker wrote the best, and possibly only, book on sleep for us layman – Why We Sleep. See what he says about setting alarms:

Set an alarm for bedtime. Often we set the alarm for when it’s time to wake up but fail to do so for when it’s time to go to sleep. If there is only one piece of advice, you remember and take from these twelve tips, this should be it.

Walker, Matthew. Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams (p. 341). Scribner. Kindle Edition.

There's a lot of research on the book's chapters, each chapter distilled down to its conclusions, and those chapter conclusions in turn distilled to 12 tips in the book's appendix on sleep hygiene. Finally, out of those 12 summary tips, the author mentions one sole tip as the most important takeaway from the whole book:

Sleep at the same time every day.

In Spanish and Portuguese, the alarm clock is called "despertador," the "awakener," because it rings to wake us up. I joke that my alarm clock is a "dormidor," the "sleeper," because it rings when it's time to go to bed.

I also now use an alarm to wake up, but I didn't for a long time. It was unnecessary as long as I was sleeping at the same time every day.

The challenge with sleep is not how to wake up at the right time every day; it's sleeping at the right time every day.

In my examples, I talk about the difference between the ease of stopping what I'm doing and going to sleep when I'm watching a TV show compared to when I'm reading. What I'm doing just before sleep significantly affects my ability to sleep on time.

Technically, nothing prevents somebody else from consistently turning the TV off at bedtime midway through an episode instead of waiting for it to end.

Technically, nothing prevents us from going to bed right away instead of watching just one more episode after that last one, either.

But the reality is that everybody I talk to struggles with sleeping on time when watching TV shows. It's hard to stop ourselves from watching that next episode in the 5 seconds between the end of an episode and the next one.

And nobody stops mid-episode to go to sleep.

In any case, the critical part is choosing an activity that can be consistently stopped at bedtime, so we can use the time allocated to sleep by going to sleep instead of doing something else.

Here's Gretchen Rubin talking about her .. err awakening, to sleeping at the same time every day on the excellent habits book Better than Before:

To my dismay, the UP band revealed that even an avowed sleep nut like me often stayed up too late. I’d fallen into a classic failure-to-monitor trap: because I felt smug about my good sleep habits, I remembered the nights when I went to bed at 9:45 but overlooked the nights when I stayed up until 11:30 or later.
Once monitoring showed that I wasn’t getting enough sleep, I decided to give myself a specific bedtime. Every night, if I was home, I’d aim to be in bed by 10:30.
Now, every night at 10:30, I tell myself, “It’s my bedtime,” and if I’m still up at 11:00, I say, “It’s thirty minutes past my bedtime.” [..]

Rubin, Gretchen. Better Than Before: What I Learned About Making and Breaking Habits--to Sleep More, Quit Sugar, Procrastinate Less, and Generally Build a Happier Life (p. 53). Crown/Archetype. Kindle Edition.

Gretchen is not hardcore like I am, but the principle is the same: if sleeping is critical and waking up at the same time every day is necessary, then the only choice is to sleep at the same time every day. Obvious when stated in this way, but much harder to do in practice than it seems.

105 hours starts with the premise that sleep is non-negotiable and that any effective time management system needs to allow the necessary amount of sleep so that I can perform at a high level all day, every day, indefinitely.

And that's 9 hours allocated to sleep every day.