Sleep deprivation to “get stuff done” is actually the worst possible thing one can do to oneself. Anytime I have been sleep deprived, it has usually been because I just cannot help it – sleep sometimes refuses to bestow her bountiful presence upon me. I hate staying up all night. I usually end up sleeping all the next day (missing out on stuff), or operating at a “diminished capacity”.
I actually think that all my sleepless nights in the immediate past has actually been the key factor in destroying my recent memory faculty and that damned annoying inability to think clearly and logically.
Forgoing sleep is like borrowing from a loan shark. Sure you get that extra hours right now to cover for your overly-optimistic estimation, but at what price? The shark will be back and if you can’t pay, he’ll break your creativity, morale, and good-mannered nature as virtue twigs.
Ha – nice imagery.
the costs the following day were typical, numerable, and expensive:
- Stubbornness: When I’m really tired, it always seems easier to plow down whatever bad path I happen to be on instead of reconsidering the route. The finish line is a constant mirage and I’ll be walking in the desert for much longer than was ever a good idea.
- Lack of creativity: What separates programmers who are 10x more effective than the norm is not that they write 10x as many lines of code. It’s that they use their creativity to solve the problem with 1/10th of the effort. The creativity to come up with those 1/10th solutions drops drastically when I’m tired.
- Diminished morale: When my brain isn’t firing on all cylinders, it loves to feed on less demanding tasks. Like reading my RSS feeds for the 5th time today or reading yet another article about stuff that doesn’t matter. My motivation to attack the problems of real importance is not nearly up to par.
- Irritability: If you encounter someone who’s acting like an ass, there’s a good chance they’re suffering from sleep deprivation. Your ability to remain patient and tolerant is severely impacted when you’re tired. I know I’m at my worst when sleep deprived.
But damn … here I am quoting the entire article …. but I had to make SURE you got the point, dear readers:
This is why I’ve always tried to get about 8 1/2 hours of sleep. That seems to be the best way for me to get access to peak mental performance. You might well require less (or more), but to think you can do with 6 hours or less is probably an illusion. Worse, it’s an illusion you’ll have a hard time bursting. Sleep-deprived people often vastly underestimate the impact on their abilities, studies have shown.
Maybe I am sleep deprived – being stubborn about making the point. 
Bottom line, boasting about staying up all night or staying up late to complete a task is not something to be proud of. It’s something to be ashamed of – sleep is the only way the brain (and body) renews itself. Always heard “it’ll feel/look better in the morning”? It’s not just something people say to make you sleep, from personal experience, I can vouch that a good night’s sleep ALWAYS puts a different perspective on things and that sometimes the answers you seek in the darkness of night show up on your doorstep, unannounced, with a smile and a kind word in the light of morning.
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