I am back on my modified Everyman schedule for the last few days, and I am particularly euphoric today because it’s 8am and I more-or-less finished my work for the day.  I am feeling fabulous and getting a lot done.  What a life ;).

It’s difficult to believe that I have been following the same polyphasic plan or idea now since March, almost 6 months – that is very unlike me!  Although I have not been polyphasic every day – in fact it’s been the exception rather than the rule – it’s been a consistent and stubborn notion of mine for that entire time.  How sweet  that it is finally coming to fruition.

And what is just as important is the lessons learned.  It has confirmed my original hypothesis, which is that to be successful with polyphasic sleep you need to be willing to examine (and question) the totality of your life. This includes the overall quality of your life, your current level of success, your diet and health and self-care regimen, your current performance management system and whether it’s working or not, etc., etc.

And I return also to my original assertion: that polyphasic sleep remains one of the greatest consciousness experiment (developmental experiences) that anyone can do alone.  It doesn’t require you travel to India, attend any expensive seminar or purchase any programs, or even leave your house.  All you need is a bed and an office (and maybe a garage and a kitchen, that you can tidy-up when you are too hung-over from lack of sleep to do anything else ;).  Life doesn’t get much simpler than that.

However if your life is in crisis, it’s unlikely to work.  It’s a very rare individual who can successfully adapt to polyphasic in the midst of a major depression – Puredoxyk is one, but this is very rare.  Back in February, when my marriage was in shambles, my business struggling, ,my health challenged, and my coffee addiction out-of-control, there was no way I could have succeeded.  But the idea was planted – and it’s been a very persistent idea, us polyphasers are a strange blend of stubbornness and obsession, which is probably not a bad thing ;).

And also as I had mentioned in an earlier post, polyphasic sleep is likely to activate any latent addictions or addictive tendencies that you might have.  I am not talking about heavy-duty chemical addictions, or even of the ordinary (garden-variety) addictions that most of us deal with around things like sex, relationships or co-dependency, workaholism, money etc – I am talking about the fundamental “addiction” of the human condition, which is the attempt to control or manipulate our environment to meet our needs and avoid pain.  This of course is natural and healthy to a degree – many great works were accomplished out of that motive – but there is a cost to it as well.  See this powerful article by Waking Down in Mutuality teacher Ted Strauss.  A life well-lived is not just about performance, overcoming obstacles and being productive members of society.  It’s also about our soul, our spiritual condition, our relationship to our creator.

The culmination of this epic inquiry has been the creation of my main site and passion business Lifestyle Design School, which is a performance management system for internet marketers and other work-at-home professionals.  Check it out.

I know people are reading this (from my stats), so if you like what you are hearing, please comment, retweet, subscribe (top right), or write to me at marc.

Blessings on your journey,

Marc

Update 11/14/2011: I now use the very simple and elegant Android app for this.

I was looking around for some simple way to track my time on a 24-hour cycle, found a few articles related to tracking time spent browsing the internet, but nothing for my purposes so I made a simple spreadsheet with automatic tabulation of results.  It’s fairly self-explanatory and looks like this:

How to use:

1. Download here (right-click > Download to your computer)
2. Open in Excel
3. Setup your time category labels in column R
4. Print out a copy.  Write your weekly schedule (or as close approximation as you can) in columns B, D, E etc
5. As you go through the day jot down the numeric code of each activity you do per half-hour time slot on the printout, and then later transcribe to the computer.  You can choose to record EVERYTHING you do for a week including sleep (I did – it’s quite instructive) or, just write down significant events you want to track (ie, work activity)
6. I suggest you follow the procedure in Your Money or Your Lifeat the end of each week for valuing / prioritizing your time / money use.  For each time category, decide if
   • You want to spend more time on that activity
   • You want to spend less time
   • Or, it’s about right

Additional resources

• Found this: Xpert-timer works well for timing project-related activity at the computer.  Especially nice is the activity timer, with start/stop clock, and project assignment.  I am buying it for work-related activity and automatic invoice generation, but for personal use I still need something on paper that I can fill-in during the day and transcribe
• The ODesk application may work well for this purpose as well, and be free.  I need to check it out
• Lots of tools available for the very popular David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology – see Zen Habits: 5 Simple, Effective GTD Tools and/or Google “GTD Tools”.

My issue with all of the above: they are great for work-related tasks, but I want a global solution that includes sleep and personal / recreational time, and that works when I am not at the computer.  I don’t want to run my life 24 hours as a project, but I do want to know where my time goes in order to perform a regular assessment / prioritization of my time usage.

I also need (separate project) a tool to track work-hours and automatically generate invoice details for billable hours.  Still looking, will follow-up on this later.