Sacrificing Sleep

One of the borderline ridiculous claims I like to make is that I can actually get work done while I’m sleeping. It sounds crazy, but it’s true. This would be pretty hard to do in some lines of work, but in software development, it can really happen. I imagine it can happen in other of lines of work too, but I can best comment on software development.

I myself have been personally aware of how this works and have experienced it for some time. But, I had never been able to articulate the concept, and had never seen it described by someone else.

Until now. Paul Graham just broke it all down very well in one of his best essays yet, Holding a Program in One’s Head. This one statement sums it up pretty well:

“You hold the whole program in your head, and you can manipulate it at will.”

If you love the software you’re building, then you’ll be more likely to have the code loaded into your head. And while you sleep, you can subconsciously “solve” problems… waking up to see things in a new light. So, if the actual tangible output of software development type work is code - code that is written in a programming language and runs on a computer - then it follows that any progress made on that code equates to actual work progress. You just need to “download” any changes you made to the code while in your head, so you can run it on the computer. Nice.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 26th, 2007 at 1:27 pm and is filed under building it, mojo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.