Just imagine how much more we could get done if we didn’t need to sleep, ever.

I’m one of those people that needs my 8 hours sleep, as I’ve mentioned before. If I don’t get my full allocation during the week, then I really need to recoup it at the weekend if at all possible.

I consider myself fairly active for the 16 hours a day that I’m awake, and I often imagine how much more I could get done if I only needed, say, 4 hours sleep a night. There have been plenty of well-known people in history who operated extremely well, with no apparent side effects, on a fraction of the daily recommended amount, but I’m not one of them, either on the famous front or the sleep minimisation front.

But if we didn’t sleep at all, with no downside, we would effectively reach 24/7 productivity. An extra 50% over what I currently get, which sounds pretty attractive, at least when you look at the pure numbers.

I’m not talking about not being able to sleep for long periods, something called Fatal Familial Insomnia, which sounds as bad as anything could be for a person. I’m really talking about not needing to sleep.

On reflection, though, and on balance, I spend about two-thirds of the week working, and the rest on rest and relaxation, so maybe doing the same on a typical day is about right too.

The comment usually attributed to Albert Einstein is that insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting a different outcome, or words to that effect.

For someone who regularly blogs about the primacy of productivity, I have a number of annoying habits that harm my productivity. They’re not mistakes as such, and I’m not insane, but they are silly and for that I am stupid.

One of them is that I almost never unsubscribe to emails from companies that I haven’t re-engaged with after the initial engagement. I argue to myself that I don’t open the email, and it only takes me a second or two to read the subject line and hit delete. When there are 20-50 of those emails a day, every day, it adds up, especially taking its toll on my attention and mental budgets.

Another peccadillo is the process for creating a new text document for writing. I was doing some personal writing the other day and I like to start a new document for each page, because each subject in the project I’m working on is no more than a page. Each new document comes up in the default font, which is not my favourite font, so I write a few lines, highlight them all, and change the font. Every single time.

Finally, I got round to searching the help function for how to re-set the default font and 2 minutes later my new docs were appearing in the lettering I like.

Why didn’t I do that a thousand documents ago? Madness…