Chief Nourisher in Life’s Feast
Entrepreneur, former Facebook director of market development, and Mark Zuckerberg sibling, Randi Zuckerberg managed to convey the challenges and tradeoffs of the entrepreneurial lifestyle in unusually concise manner on Twitter a few years back:
Now, this is not just an entrepreneur’s dilemma. All of us go through this every day, and a lot of us choose to sacrifice sleep. Bad idea!
I have not been sleeping much these past few weeks, and I noticed that though I spend more hours at work, I am not as efficient as my well-rested self. And then I stumbled on The Economics of Sleep, and it opened my eyes (helped me realize that I should get more shut-eye). The podcast talks about how the lack of sleep affects cognitive reasoning and how it is a potential health hazard. So sleep is a big deal. But why do we take it so lightly?
“Burning the midnight oil.” That’s why! We’ve been told that someone who sleep less, works harder and thus, is more likely to succeed. (Yes, they work harder. That’s because their brains stop functioning at optimal efficiency after a point). We have to move away from this Industrial Age thinking and look at sleep as mandatory, not optional.
Dan Kedmey talks about the adverse effects of working overtime in The business case against overtime. Yes, overtime is not directly linked to lack of sleep. But when we are confronted with the ‘entrepreneur’s dilemma,' most of us just choose the easy way out and ‘pick 3’ - sleep or fitness are the first casualties. Bad idea! You’ll get exhausted, and this will lead to inefficiency.
My way of solving this problem is to sleep for at least 7 hours every day, do some HIIT workout right after I get up, and keep a few hours every week scheduled for friends and family. “What about work?”, I hear you ask. Well, ambitious as we are, the work scene will fall in place if we secure the other three battlefronts.
