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Nobody likes skimping on sleep, but chances are you've done it. Whether to study for an exam, finish a tough project, or simply because you got stuck in an airport, pulling an all-nighter happens.
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But with all that in mind, there are steps you can take to minimize the damage and treat your body (and brain) as well as possible under bad circumstances. Here's how to survive the night—and recover ASAP.
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1. Bank sleep ahead of time.
2. Get any amount of shut-eye.
3. Bring on the lights.
4. Keep your room temperature moderate.
5. Skip the sugar and snack on protein and carbs.
6. Drink a little coffee—and a lot of water.
7. Get up and walk around.
The article also has tips for surviving the next day after an all-nighter. Do Soylentils have any techniques not listed to help them through all-nighters?
(Score: 2) by edIII on Wednesday August 05 2015, @10:12PM
Uhhhh..... No. Have to disagree with you on that.
It's not a red flag of failure. Sometimes the logistics simply *don't allow* anything but an all-nighter. To be completely fair, I'm not a good example as I'm one of the people that can be awake 60+, 70+, and 100+ hours with almost no difference in work performance *once* I get over the "hump". That "hump" is more accurately described as a mountain, at least from watching other people drop like flies around me. Somebody else here said that "it's all the same" after being awake a few days, and that's what comes after the "hump", what I call the "Dreamless Plains". Your real issue is just keeping connected back to reality, and you know, actually giving a shit about the TCP/IP settings you're putting into the router. Near as I can tell there is a rather sharp "hump" between 20-24 hours, and afterwards they can come spaced around 18 hours apart until about ~60 hours. After that I haven't experienced any resistance towards staying awake anymore. It's like it just stops and everything "evens" out. I'll be really honest; I'm far more concerned about the effects of age on my work performance than I am about sleep deprivation.
I don't expect you to believe that I can regularly perform at 40+ hours awake (perhaps more than 100 times), but this is not unusual for trained astronauts. Sleep deprivation and the need to perform work in space after being up 50+ hours is surprisingly important as a skill. It's simply too bad NASA couldn't get Congress to cover the extra booster rocket it would take to get me up there ;) Aside from the fact that some people can do all-nighters and make it look easy, logistics sometimes requires them. I can give an example too...
Medium sized business in a bad economy that cannot afford to maintain geographical redundancy. Meaning, they couldn't be in two different datacenters while syncing their data between them. Project planning cannot account for the stark lack of funds. A multi State (as in like Texas) move to consolidate servers across two datacenters into a single one on the west coast is the project. Close of business is 3pm PST on Friday and servers need to back up and running for employees by Monday at 9am. I can't afford 30k in the budget to just buy new servers and slowly sync data, I need to *move* 30k worth of existing equipment.
The only realistic option available was me being awake from Friday morning till Tuesday morning. It was either that, or it didn't get done.
What do you do? I could have said no.... but how was it going to get done then? I'm not sure the problem was planning as much as it was that we simply weren't funded well enough to do it otherwise. There was some project planning involved. I was not entirely responsible for much of anything come Monday morning, and I had another IT guy on hand to help double check everything. Checklists and testing help quite a bit, and if you're tired it's a mercy to have a list with checkboxes that your less tired self prepared beforehand.
In this case I can't even blame a worthless sack of human waste, meaning an executive caused it through shortsightedness or greed. It wasn't anybody's fault it turned out like that, and somebody just needed to step up. In fact, I can recall more than one instance it was required simply because it's not possible to do these things during business hours. At all.
It's a bit simplistic to call it a red flag every time when there are plenty of use cases that simply preclude it.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by zafiro17 on Saturday August 08 2015, @02:06PM
I won't dispute your superhuman ability to perform well on little sleep. Maybe you're a better man than I. But management put you in this position via poor choices, including as you allude, some funky cash management.
From the point of view of a manager: if your system is at risk unless one of your employees does something the human body should not normally do, you have failed to plan correctly. The fact that your employee is a god among men who is both willing and able to save your bacon is luck and happenstance. When that employee crashes his car because he fell asleep at the wheel, your business is toast (as it deserves).
I maintain: planning and proper management are the issue here. Everything else is just luck.
Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis - Jack Handey