It's a tradeoff - I can go home and spend more social time, leisure time and put more personal time into my projects if I sleep less. The 2-3 hours of extra time I get by sleeping like crap allows me to do things I wouldn't otherwise get to do. Productivity couldn't improve these if there's no time left in the day to do them.
It costs me at work, I'm sure of it, but it hasn't gotten me fired or even significantly prevented me from doing my job, so why would I change it? There's no need to be obsessed with scraping every last ounce of productivity out of myself at work. I like my job, but feel no obligation for that.
Because you’re doing long-term damage to your brain?
Now, it’s possible that you’re not, and the brain can heal itself, but that’s why I try and get enough sleep. It disturbs me to think that the impossibly complex biomechanical machine in my head is slogging through excess waste products to try and crank out acceptable performance.
Most of these studies tend to be focused on temporary effects, including this one. Most of that "damage" can be undone with a good nights sleep.
But even if some amount is permanent, so what? Does my brain need to be in mint condition? If the cost of getting more enjoyment out of life is a little brain damage, so be it. I hold no ego about my brain being perfect. Performance is only one aspect of life and not one I strive to prioritize significantly over enjoyment.
I was referring to evidence that chronic sleep deprivation can increase the risk of Alzheimer’s and other dementias by allowing the brain less time to flush out amyloid proteins that can aggregate.
...But everyone’s brain is different, and if you don’t feel your enjoyment of life is being affected, then it’s entirely possible your brain is getting all its maintenance needs met in the time you sleep.
I didn’t mean to sound moralizing or judgmental— these decisions are of course entirely ours to make for ourselves.
My personal experience is that long term sleep deprivation took me several months of recovery to even approach the mental capacity I had previously. Having kids really fucked up my sleep schedule, and I was not getting enough rem cycles for about 2 years. It wasn't until my first was sleeping through the night consistently that I began to recover.
> It costs me at work, I'm sure of it, but it hasn't gotten me fired or even significantly prevented me from doing my job, so why would I change it?
That's exactly it, it's a lose-lose. Honestly, I think it's the number one thing I look for when weighing a job offer: if I spend 5 hours a day writing high quality code, will anyone care if I take off after? I'd rather have time to go home, go to the gym, relax, and get 9 hours of sleep. I hate the feeling of just being at the office because I feel like I should. It makes me happier and honestly, over the long-term, my work output is better than when I was working 10 hour days.
You're approaching productivity from the wrong angle. It's not about producing more, and especially not producing more while tired... it's about doing less unnecessary work. This requires thought, and is easier with a full night's sleep.
However you define productivity, I still work the same number of hours in a given day, so whether it's more output or better output, it's still all the same to me. There's no reason for me to invest the extra hours in sleep to improve it when I can invest that time in things I enjoy. I don't see how that changes anything I said. My work is defined by hours, not goals, not lines of code, but hours.
If you are X% less productive you will be able to charge X% less for your work, on average, so you would need to work longer hours for the same pay. You might also be shortening your life by not sleeping enough, perhaps by a larger amount than you're gaining by sleeping less. That is clearly the case in the limit of not sleeping at all -- you would shorten your life to a month at best, not to mention that the quality of life would go down.
> If you are X% less productive you will be able to charge X% less for your work, on average, so you would need to work longer hours for the same pay.
That's making the huge assumption that you're willing to constantly seek your maximum pay and that you get paid solely for your measurable productivity output, which is in my experience very rarely the case. More often than not you get paid based on capabilities and responsibilities, not significantly more or less on your output. It's certainly not a direct X% less productive = X% less pay relationship. I believe it's been shown that seeking new employers is the best way to maximize pay, but that means interviews are often the difference between you and more pay, yet no one can judge future productivity in an interview.
> you would shorten your life to a month at best
To my knowledge, sleep dep hasn't actually killed people directly like this, they simply start sleeping.
There is a somewhat rare genetic disease where at some point in their life people can't sleep any more and eventually die from it. So yes, there are more.
"If you are X% less productive you will be able to charge X% less for your work"
That is not how it works practically. Less productive people don't get less salaries, unless their productivity is going really really down. Most companies use hours spend at work as proxy for productivity for salary purposes. Oftentimes you may look like super productive cause you are fixing a lot of bugs or constantly runing meetings. That bug were cause by you or those meetings could be half shorter is something superiors rarely see.
It's a tradeoff - I can go home and spend more social time, leisure time and put more personal time into my projects if I sleep less. The 2-3 hours of extra time I get by sleeping like crap allows me to do things I wouldn't otherwise get to do. Productivity couldn't improve these if there's no time left in the day to do them.
It costs me at work, I'm sure of it, but it hasn't gotten me fired or even significantly prevented me from doing my job, so why would I change it? There's no need to be obsessed with scraping every last ounce of productivity out of myself at work. I like my job, but feel no obligation for that.