2025-01-20 Sleep versus productivity

Everybody says that in order to be productive, you need to get enough sleep. This, of course, seems reasonable, but is there a way to actually confirm it scientifically?

Well, here is my attempt. Note that it is not really very scientific – but at least it is measurable.

I’ve been using the current iteration (with minor changes) of my personal productivity system for over 3 years now. Of course, I track the “points” I get for completing my tasks in Beeminder. Also, I have Beeminder goals to go to bed and get up not too late. Those two are simple – I track the “number of minutes after 22:00 I go to bed” and “number of minutes after 5:00 I get up” as do-less goals. I’ve been tracking those for almost 9 years now.

Recently, it occurred to me that this means that I have pretty precise data about the length of my sleep and about how productive I was the next day. How about running some simple analysis on those data? Beeminder lets me export all my data for a goal as a csv file (as it should – these are my data, after all!), so that’s exactly what I did.

I am sad to report that the results were rather disappointing. The correlation coefficient between my sleep time and the “productivity points” turned out to be 0.06 – positive, but basically negligible.

I still believe that getting enough sleep is important, of course – even though my primitive experiment did not confirm it. If you have any ideas about how to perform a similar experiment in a better way – I’m all ears. In the meantime, I will continue using my systems.

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