Is sleep a waste of time?

(No, but I found the things that are)

OK so there’s no delicate way to say this: I feel like shit. Maybe it’s because of hormones. Or the absence of meat in my diet. Or another bout of creeping anxiety. Or maybe, just maybe — and I’m just listing down possible culprits here — it’s the lack of sleep?

But nah, that can’t be right: I’ve been getting more sleep than I normally do (all thanks to my body clock adjusting to the solstice). So here’s another wild guess: maybe I feel like shit because I have been getting enough sleep, and therefore have less time to squeeze in all the stuff I want to do. I am not as productive as I hope to be and I blame sleep.

The point here is that there is so much I want to sneak into my day just to avoid feeling bad about not doing enough things in my life, but there’s just so little time I can work with when a third of it has to be budgeted for staying in bed (let’s be real here though, I don’t get eight hours… who does?). And it’s something I can’t even multi-task!

This past month of tracking* what I’ve been spending my time on helped me balance my day around spending quality social time, learning, creating, exercising, etc. I’ve scheduled most of the human stuff alongside some of the stuff I wanted to squeeze into the day: listening to audiobooks on runs, checking up on family while eating, writing music in the shower, and offering a friend a ride home (so we get quality time over Metro Manila traffic). Sleep is the ultimate human thing that I can’t schedule with anything else. I try to get a little reading or writing done in bed, but it decreases the quality of sleep I get.

The body needs quality sleep to function at optimal rates, which I completely understand is good for me physically and psychologically. Alright, fine, I’m all for efficiency. But when it’s 5AM and I am IN THE ZONE writing business rules for a feature I’ve been wrestling with, I really don’t appreciate my body telling me that it’s time to stop.

Oh, the things I could do if my body didn’t need sleep! But alas, it does. Ever since my failed experiment to get two extra months per year by adopting a polyphasic sleep schedule (at best, I’ve achieved the biphasic one), I’ve conceded that if I want to continue being functional, I have to respect my body’s needs.

That doesn’t mean this busy bee has given up getting more stuff done though. Because of my recent effort to track my time*, I found the things I do that my body doesn’t need — or at least, doesn’t need as much time dedicated to them:

1. Chewing. I must be in the top 5% of the world’s slowest eaters. Although I’m still a lazy chewer now, I’d like to think that I improved somehow (and lessened the time necessary for mealtimes) by choosing food that’s easier to consume (it also helps that I don’t eat meat!).
2. Getting ready to go out. A full hour. It takes me a full hour to get ready to go out because I need to decide on what to wear, which shoes go with it, which bag is appropriate for the activities of the day, and then I still need to groom to look decent. This decision fatigue compounds and I really need to cut it out by having less items of clothing to choose from. One day I’ll pull a Zuckerberg and wear the same thing to work everyday. For now, I’ve switched to a go-to small bag and rotate around four pairs of shoes.
3. Commuting. During the peak of rush hour, it takes me about two hours to go to work in the neighboring city (approximately 18km away). With no traffic, I can easily drive that in less than twenty minutes. Easily. I’ve decided long ago that I will not waste time and fuel reporting to the office during known rush hours unless absolutely necessary. I leave the house when I know most of the office workers in the Metro are no longer on the road, and I’m lucky that I can do this because of my company’s flexible working schedule.
4. Checking social media. This one’s a no-brainer. Of course, everyone is aware that the average Filipino spends 3.7 hours a day on social media. I spend at most an hour and a half. I deleted the Facebook app on my phone a year ago, Snapchat a month ago, and I don’t post that much anywhere else except on Twitter. I realized that what I need to do to get this feed scrolling down to less than an hour is to find a different activity to fill my short breaks with. I made the newsfeed my crutch when I find myself idle, so now I’m training myself to read and reply to messages instead (a serious character flaw of mine is not attending to these).
5. Feeling like shit. It has come full circle. No joke, I am too detailed with my time tracking* that I know just how much time I waste feeling bad for myself. It took me two hours to write this piece and it took me days of introspection to get to the bottom of why I’ve been so down in the dumps. It’s a vicious cycle: I sulk in bed or wherever about not having enough time and then lose that precious time I needed in the process. I’m cutting it down now though, I try to get myself out of the spiral quicker.

I realized that awareness is the key. When I find myself spending too much time on these things I listed — these things that my body doesn’t need — I remind myself:

The clock is ticking. What can I do to make this time more productive?

*Note: if you’re the type of person who lists down expenses, I recommend that you do this for time too! Time is more valuable than money, so there’s no reason you shouldn’t be tracking where your precious 24 hours go. I’ll probably make a more solid case for this next time, but for now, trust me on this one.