In many ways, this type of lifestyle has created a “culturally induced ADD” — sending you off every which way, promising to fill your life with lots of action but not much substance. The constant go-go-go gives a false sense of accomplishment that you are doing stuff, but despite all of the hullabaloo, at the end of it you’re not left with much.

Sadly enough, it doesn’t look like we can turn to modern society for help and technology has only proven to exacerbate the problem. The solution, surprisingly, can be found in the wisdom from societies and teachings of centuries past and is accomplished by setting apart one day per week that is dedicated as a “day of rest.”

In the Judeo-Christian world for example, their day of rest is the Sabbath � one day out of seven devoted to rest, reflection and recommitment. In the Buddhist tradition they practice Uposatha a similar concept where one day per week is set apart for “the cleansing of the defiled mind,” resulting in inner joy.

Whether you are religious, spiritual, or atheist it doesn’t matter — all can benefit from the principle behind this practice.

Automobiles and machines in general do not function at their optimal levels unless they are regularly tuned up. Our body, mind, heart, and spirit follows the same principle. It has been proven many times over that constantly pushing yourself only leads to burnout, breakdown and eventual disease. The ever-increasing pace of our modern society is only making this deterioration pass by quicker. The solution is to give ourselves regular “tune-ups” by making the habit of setting aside our own personal day of rest. A Sabbath day if you will.

So what exactly do you do on a day of rest? Do you just loaf around all day or sleep the day through? Well, maybe if that’s what you need. But perhaps you’ll have a better idea of what you might decide to do if I share with you some of the activities that are part of my weekly “tune-up.”

Here are some of the things I like to do on my day of rest:

• Reflect on the week gone by.
• Plan for the upcoming week.
• Review prior goals and set new ones.
• Read in the “wisdom literature” of the past.
• Visit relatives
• Enjoy “quiet time” in nature by myself or with my family.
• Meditate or pray
• Take a nap (however, since doing Polyphasic sleeping, this has become a regular activity)

All in all, your day or rest should be a day to leave the week behind you. To stop working or even thinking about work. It should be a different day from all the rest. One that you look forward to with excitement and expectation. It’s a day to stop looking to the outside world for distraction or entertainment. It’s a day to be quiet, to sit back and reflect on all the gifts and blessings of your life and the things which you take for granted. It’s a day for nature and beauty and spirituality; a day for family, friends and God.

A day of rest doesn’t affect us only when we are resting. It spills over into our weeks, our months, and our entire lives. Even the most difficult of weeks becomes tolerable because you know that this day is just over the horizon.

If you make the habit of doing this regularly, I promise that it will improve your health, strengthen your relationships, sharpen your mind and revive your spirit. That’s a lot to promise, I know. But that is the power of your day of rest.

get home bag

David Seah — designer-extraordinaire and fellow New England resident — has created a great series of free productivity tools called the ‘Printable CEO’ that aid in your high-level goal setting, time tracking, and task tracking efforts.

In his studies of leadership and excellence, David discovered a simple question asked by the most successful executives in business: What can I do to add value to my company? This question would later inspire him to go in search of his own personal CEO.

For David (as well as us), hiring his own personal CEO to run his life was just not realistic, so he designed the next best thing: a ‘printable CEO’ to motivate his business development activities. The Concrete Goals Tracker was built off of the idea that if a task at hand doesn’t add value to your bottom-line (whatever that might be to you personally) then do something else that does.

The first component of the Concrete Goals Tracker is designed around a list of tasks that contribute to achieving your goals. Weighted points (10, 5, 2, and 1) are assigned to each task which reflect their power in moving you closer to accomplishing those goals. Lower weights are given to tasks that you do frequently (with the assumption that you don’t need the extra motivation) while higher weights reflect those tasks that are more difficult or require more effort or motivation to accomplish.

The second component is centered around a weekly progress chart that has these fill-in bubbles that you can use with a No.2 pencil (similar to those ScanTron tests that we had in high school). The different bubbles are labeled with the weights that correspond with the previous list.

Whenever something on the list is accomplished, you fill in the respective bubbles and add them up in the final column for the day. The benefit comes when you set some minimum level for that day like, “Today I’ll make 6 points.” When you reach or exceed that number you know that you’ve had a good day. This is also easy to track your progress over the course of a week or a month and you get visual confirmation that you are making headway on your goals.

I find this particularly appealing over the standard to-do list because of the absence of the guilt-factor. It seems that whenever I make a daily to-do list and don’t accomplish everything on it, I feel terrible. However, with the Concrete Goals Tracker it lends to a sense of achievement because you’re focusing on the progress you’ve made and what you’ve accomplished instead of what you haven’t.

So how can you apply this tool in your life? Well, there are many options. If you’re a freelancer or small business owner, you can leverage the existing freelancer or small-business owner PDF versions that David has created. Otherwise, if you’re like me and want to apply this to other areas of your life you can customize your own through either the the Excel version or the editable PDF version. For example, if you’re a blogger one of your goals might be to increase your feed subscribers to 2000. So you would assign point values to tasks/results that help you accomplish this. A 10-point result could be guest blogging on another blogger’s site. A 5-point task might be writing a blog article; 2-points could be commenting on someone else’s blog and 1-point might be responding to comments on your own blog.

Another example might be with your health & fitness goals. Perhaps a 10-point result would be losing 5 pounds. You might earn 5 points by exercising or going the whole day without eating any junk food. 2 points might be when you drink 8 glasses of water a day and 1 point might be simply taking the stairs instead of the elevator. The whole point is that you could apply this simple system to many different areas of your life.

David has created a number of cool tools in various formats that you can download by checking out his Printable CEO Series.

For the next ten days I’ll be applying the 10-Day Experiment to the Concrete Goals Tracker to see if it’s worth continuing. Be sure to check back to see my results!

I remember during scouting as a kid, we would often practice orienteering. After we were given a compass and a map, our scout leader would point out our destination on the map and it was then up to us to correctly estimate and map out the journey so that we would successfully arrive there.

The key to success with orienteering is not to simply make a B-line to the destination but instead to divide the journey into several checkpoints along the way. As we traveled along these checkpoints, they provided a way to not only track our progress but to recalibrate our compasses and regain our bearings so that we were sure we were heading in the right direction. By doing this we never strayed too far off course because the checkpoints acted as early-warning signs to a miscalculated route or an incorrectly configured compass.

The same holds true with goals. The key to succeeding in your goals is to divide them up into sub-parts and then use those sub-parts as regular ‘checkpoints’ along the way to determine your progress and to fine-tune your approach. This could be a time-driven approach where you divide up a goal (such as quitting smoking) into time units (see the 10-day challenge) or based on specific tasks that are accomplished (you want to write a book so you divide that goal into checkpoints of individual chapters).

Once you’ve reached a checkpoint, the most important task is to ‘recalibrate.’ That is, to get your bearings by observing what is or what is not working, why it is working or not, and then make any adjustments to your approach that will help you reach your final destination.

Let’s use the example of wanting to lose 20 pounds in two months. You decide to break this goal up into weekly checkpoints (such as every Sunday) where you expect to lose around two pounds per checkpoint.

When Sunday comes along your first step is to get your bearings — that is, you determine where you are in relation to your goal. Since your goal is to lose weight, the most important bearing would be weighing yourself. If you’ve lost two pounds than great, stick to what is working for you and continue on. If you haven’t than it is at this time that you need to ‘recalibrate.’

Recalibrating in this example might be looking over what you’ve eaten over the last week (assuming you kept a food log), determining how many calories you’ve consumed, and then decreasing them the next week. If you don’t know the amount of calories you’ve eaten, then part of the recalibration process might be to start keeping a food log. Or perhaps you notice that you need to increase the frequency of exercise, so you add an extra day. The key here is to make some kind of change. It has been said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results. If your not happy with the course you’re taking than change the course. This is the whole purpose of the recalibration step.

After a number of recalibrations, you may notice that you are doing everything you can to make progress but your just not getting any closer to your goal. At this time you may want to reevaluate your goal. It may be that you’ve just been unrealistic. This is where you would redefine your goal and then continue with the process. If you reach this point, don’t get discouraged because you ARE making progress. You’re realizing what works and does not work for you.

What make this process so powerful is that you are taking a systematic approach to achieving your goals . The majority make goals or set resolutions only to head out to their destination without a setting a course or regularly taking a bearing. This automatically sets them up for failure. By approaching goal achievement as one would an orienteering exercise, you’ll be well on your way to achieving what it is you’ve set out to.

If this is the first time you’ve read about my polyphasic sleep experiment check out my first post on polyphasic sleep to get some background on what I’m doing. In a nutshell, I’ve been successful at adapting to a multi- or “poly”-phased sleep schedule that consists of sleeping one core sleep period for 3 hours (typically 11pm to 2am) and then taking three 20-min naps spread throughout the day (again typically 7am, 12pm, and 7pm).

As far as sticking to the schedule in the last week, I’ve had no issues except during my Christmas vacation. Given that I’ve had a lot of various Christmas parties, it’s been pretty difficult taking some of my scheduled naps — the most difficult being the 7pm nap.

In the last post I was explaining how I’ve been able to push out a nap or two for a couple of hours without losing any mental alertness or becoming overly tired. However, due to one of the parties, this last week I had to skip a nap entirely, because I didn’t have anywhere to go take one. By the time I did my core sleep (which I had to postpone for a few hours because the party went late) I ended up sleeping through the alarm and waking up after 6 hours instead of 3. So it seems that much like people’s experiences with the Uberman sleep schedule, the Everyman isn’t very forgiving when it comes to skipping your regularly-scheduled naps.

As a side note, I’d like to mention that I broke one of my ribs while training in Martial Arts this last week. The doctor told me to hold off doing anything strenuous for about six weeks. It will be interesting to see if polyphasic sleep has any effect (good or bad) on the healing process.

As far as experimenting goes, I haven’t gone too crazy with trying out new things. I have been successful however with being able to spread the naps out a few hours forward and back from my ‘planned’ naptime. For example, I am a cub-scout leader in a near-by city and every Tuesday we have our weekly den meetings. Because the meetings start at 7 pm and finish at 8 pm I am unable to take my nap then. So I ended up taking it when i got back home at around 9 pm. I didn’t have any issues with this and found it to be quite easy to hit all the successive naps and sleep time.

Napping at work sometimes poses a problem for me. For the most part, since I have an hour break for lunch, I am able to go out in my car, drop the seat down, and nap for 20 minutes. However, with looming deadlines and pressure to finish them, I sometimes have to get certain tasks done and take a ‘working lunch’ — forcing me to take a nap later in the afternoon. The worst one yet was on Friday when I had to take it at 3 pm instead of the normal 12 noontime nap. I was definitely feeling pretty ragged when 3 o’clock hit.

Another observation that I’ve made is with regards to eating. If I eat a heavy meal before I nap, I almost always wake up feeling groggy. So what I’ll typically do (and this is more so for my noon nap than any other time) is nap right before I need to eat so I don’t suffer that ‘clouded-headed’ feeling. This also holds true for the 11 pm to 2 am core sleep. Since I typically eat dinner around 6 or 7 pm anyways, I’m usually fine. But if I eat a heavy meal later in the day (say around 9 pm) I feel pretty wrecked when I need to get up at 2 am.

This brings me to another point. I am not a vegetarian. It’s interesting that Steve Pavlina (and many other successful polyphasic sleepers) have been vegetarians. Many have attributed their success in adapting to a polyphasic sleep schedule to the fact that they’ve been vegan or vegetarian. I for the most part I eat healthy but I do eat a lot of meat and other ‘heavy’ foods. I haven’t found it to be an issue with regards to adapting to this sleep schedule though (other than if I eat right before I need to nap or sleep).

It may also be due to the fact that I’m not on the Uberman sleep schedule (basically where you nap for 20 min every four hours for a total of 2-hours sleep). Maybe that kind of diet is necessary if you want to be successful on that schedule. If that is the case, I guess the Everyman is the polyphasic sleep schedule for carnivores.

By Spring we easily have 5 – 10 pounds to lose. If you maintain that pattern for another 10 years, you’re looking at an easy 60 pounds of weight gain! This is how it unknowingly creeps up to us — pound by pound and year by year. But by making a few changes in your lifestyle during the holiday season this doesn’t have to happen to you.

With that in mind, here are 7 simple lifestyle changes that will keep the weight off this holiday season:

1. Find everyday opportunities to burn more calories.

When you go about your typical day, look for opportunities to walk more. Since it’s such a hassle to find parking anyway this season, park your car at the farthest end of the parking lot and briskly walk to the stores. If work is close enough, walk. If not, park your car a half mile away and hike it in. Take the stairs instead of an elevator or escalator. Walk to a co-worker’s cubicle rather than e-mail her. You’ll be surprised at how the ‘little things’ add up.

2. Don’t forget to drink.

Because people forget to drink water throughout the day, they often confuse hunger with the need to hydrate. The average person should be drinking about 1/2 to 1 gallon a day (this is a glass of water every hour or two). Drinking a large glass of water a half-hour before a large meal will not only curb your hunger but will help you burn fat more efficiently. Remember, don’t just wait until you’re thirsty. Thirst, after all, is the first stage of dehydration.

3. Brush your teeth after meals

Have you ever tried to eat or drink something right after brushing your teeth? Yuck! As soon as your done with your meal, get in the habit of heading to the bathroom to brush, floss, and mouthwash so that your pearly whites feel nice and clean. This is especially important after dinner. Having a clean mouth will make eating after a meal so much less appealing.

4. Forgo the appetizers if you know you want dessert.

If you deny yourself your favorite foods during the holidays you’ll feel deprived and be more tempted to binge. It’s all about learning the art of the trade off. Whether it’s at the buffet or your best friends party, getting in the habit of deciding which trade-offs you’re willing to make will keep the calories down.

5. Keep your distance

Are you a snack-table socialite? Break the habit of hanging around the buffet tables and snack bowls to reduce the mindless snatch and grab. It’s so easy not to even notice you’ve downed a thousand calories when there’s a never-ending supply of food within arms reach. Instead, look for other places to socialize.

6. Eat slowly – eat very S-L-O-W-L-Y

In the hustle and bustle of the modern lifestyle, too few of us ever take the opportunity to really taste and enjoy the flavors of the food we’re wolfing down. Try chewing your food at least 30-40 times per mouthful and try uttering at least one sentence in-between bites. Not only will this ‘unlock’ the true flavors of the food but it will allow the hungry-full response of your brain to kick in since it takes the brain about 20 minutes to let you know you are full.

7. Eat regular meals.

Planning to skip meals earlier in the day so that you can save up for the ‘big feast’ in the evening is a big mistake. Skipping meals will only slow down your metabolism and kick your body into deprivation mode leading to a loss of control and overeating. Instead, try eating six smaller meals spread evenly throughout the day and include a bit of protein at each meal to keep you feeling satisfied.

Remember, it only takes 3,500 extra calories to pack on a pound of body fat, so it’s no wonder that weight gain is the norm during this time of year. Enjoying the holidays and staying healthy need not be an either-or condition. Make some minor changes, be smart, and you can still enjoy the festivities.

Lately I’ve been visiting some of the polyphasic-sleeping forums out on the web and have found some great discussions out there. One interesting point that someone brought up was that polyphasic sleeping is in many ways like meditation. Set at multiple times throughout the day, these short naps still the mind and bring clarity to thought. This ‘still mind’ phenomenon is one of the major goals of meditation practice. I find that as soon as I wake up after one of the naps, I’ve achieved this ‘still mind’ or an Alpha brain wave state — where I don’t have any thoughts spinning through my head. This is much more pronounced in the early-morning hours.

Overall the early-morning hours have a different ‘feel’ about them than day hours. I don’t think it is just because the sun isn’t out because I don’t get this feeling in the evening. A better way to describe it that there’s simply a peace about this time. My mind feels at ease and I seem to have greater clarity of thought. It’s definitely my favorite time of the day.

I’m pretty sure I’ll be trying the 1.5-hour core Everyman schedule. Instead of sleeping for 3 hours at night and then taking three 20-min naps spread throughout the day, I will be attempting to sleep a 1.5 hour core sleep at night and taking four 20-min naps spread throughout the day. If I do attempt that, I’ll make sure to write about it.

With all this extra time, I’m considering starting another blog about some of the other interests I have. I’ll keep you posted if I do.

Since a full week has gone by and there doesn’t seem to be too many changes going forward, I will post another article a week from today detailing any new developments that might happen from day 8 to day 14.

With Christmas coming up combined with the slow-down of time that I’m experiencing, I’m reminded of my childhood and how the month of December seemed to always drag on. Christmas never came soon enough. My excitement for that holiday caused every day to slow down to the point of crawling. However, in my adulthood, every December seemed to go by faster and faster the older I got. It’s nice that this new sleep schedule is bringing a little bit of my childhood back again. I’m actually finding the time to get excited about the holidays again!

I’ve really come to enjoy the night-time ‘shift’ as I call it. I get free run of the house and it stays quiet for around 5 hours straight (unless my baby daughter decides to wake up). I’ve been especially enjoying going outside for a few minutes at around 3 am and looking at the sky and breathing the chill winter air. It’s been especially beautiful since we’ve been getting snow — I love New England. Last night the moon was so bright it was somewhat surreal.

My wife has also been enjoying this. She loves that when my daughter starts crying that I’ll go get her and stay up with her until she falls back asleep. Also, since I’ve been getting quite a lot done around the house, she’s been especially grateful.

Unfortunately, with all this extra time, I’ve even found time to waste again. I’ve been spending at least an hour every night playing video games. It looks like I need to recommit to some of my priorities/goals again. Staying away from mindless activities like video games wasn’t difficult when I was sleeping normal because I simply did not have any extra time for it. But now that I have around 4 extra hours every night, I will need to discipline myself on how best to use it.

Besides the other things I’ve spoken about (lack of hunger, lucid & vivid dreams, feeling cold etc), I’d say one of the most apparent changes is the appearance of time. Since I’m awake most of the time now, the days seem to stretch and the last 6 days seem to have puttered along. This is by no means a bad thing. In fact I really enjoy the feeling that time is slowing down. I feel less stressed, my mind seems somewhat quieter, and I’ve noticed that I even walk slower. It’s like my body realizes that I have no need to rush anymore because there’s plenty of time. It’s quite nice actually — I hope this is a permanent change.

Last night also marks the first lucid dream since starting this experiment. Lucid dreaming is one of those ‘side-effects’ that people say they experience on the Uberman schedule. I was curious to see if this also was the case on the Everman schedule.

For those unfamiliar with lucid dreaming, it is a dream where you are aware that you are dreaming while the dream is in progress. Depending on how long you are ‘awake’ in your dream, you can actually do some pretty cool things like control the scenery, interact and control characters in the dream, perform special powers like flying around and so on. I’m no stranger to lucid dreaming — I’ve been doing it on-and-off since my childhood (probably on average twice a year). However, the combination of the vividness of the dreams since doing this experiment and the fact that I was lucid really made for some intense dreams. I’ll be pretty excited if this becomes a regular pattern.

On the downside, I am still not able to read without having the urge to dose off. Again, one of the main reasons I wanted to do this experiment (besides out of curiosity) was to have more time to dedicate to things I need to do — reading being one of them. I assume this will get better with time because I’m already able to see some major improvements in accomplishing other tasks. For example, I can now sit down and write (in my journals or for this blog) and stay very alert. It seems to be that when I am involved with activities that actively stimulate the mind (like creative writing) or the body (exercising, working on the house), it’s easy for me to stay alert. Passive activities such as TV watching and reading books are not stimulating enough to keep me awake.

Another great development was that I was able to take my noon nap two hours late (@ 2pm) without adversely affecting my alertness or ability to take the later naps. I was stuck in a work meeting and couldn’t leave to go nap in my car and was a bit worried that I would just spontaneously fall asleep in the middle of the meeting. That would’ve gone over real well at work. I’m sure they would’ve added ‘narcoleptic’ to my list of accolades.

Although I felt a bit tired during the meeting, it wasn’t unbearable. I’d have to agree with Steve Pavlina who likens it to a physical ‘urge.’ He explained that, like going to the bathroom, the need to nap begins as a slight discomfort that becomes progressively worse if the need is not met. It’s quite different than the normal ‘tired feeling’ one gets at night when sleeping monophasically.

By all appearances, the Everyman sleep schedule seems to be pretty flexible. Just the fact that I sleep 3 hours at night (11pm to 2am) and take a 20-min nap 5-hours later (7am), 5-hours after that (12pm), and then again another nap 7 hours after that (7pm) shows that the nap times do not have to be strictly and evenly placed. I would assume that the Everyman schedule is a lot more flexible than the Uberman one. However, I don’t have any experience with Uberman so I’m only going by conjecture here — as well as what I’ve read from others’ experiences.

Another recent observation is the feeling of being cold in the evening. This probably has always happened but I’m only first noticing it now because I’m awake (well, duh!). From what I know about metabolism, this is completely normal. The body naturally slows down its metabolism during the night to conserve energy and as a result, you feel cold. This also explains why I don’t have an urge to eat anything during the ‘night shift’. I wonder if being a polyphasic sleeper for an extended period of time would override this biological function and your body would actually increase its metabolism at night. That would be an interesting study.

Speaking of which, there just isn’t enough scientific research on polyphasic sleeping. With all these blogs and personal experiences out on the web you’d figure the scientific community would become interested in performing an official study on the subject. If my adaptation goes off well, I’d consider offering myself up as a guinea pig…

This past evening was a lot better in that I could actually spend some time working on projects that I had to get done on my computer without beginning to dose off. It’s not to say I didn’t have a case of the yawns last night, but at least it wasn’t a constant struggle just to stay awake this time. It’s exciting to think that I may finally be transitioning…or it could just be coincidence. I’ll have a better idea tomorrow.

I’m still not entirely sold on this whole polyphasic-sleep thing. I know it’s a bit early in the game, but from my point of view it seems like forever ago when I started this experiment. Shouldn’t I be feeling more alert by now? Don’t worry, I’m not planning on giving up any time soon (I still have 26 days to go); I guess I’m just expecting better results.

This evening my wife and daughter and I went out to eat and I’ve noticed that my appetite during the day has also been affected. Like I said on Day 2 of the log, the fact that I’m not hungry at night is understandable, but usually during the day I have a good appetite. At the restaurant I only ended up ordering a salad.

Now that I’m thinking about it, maybe it’s not that my hunger level has changed throughout the day but what I crave. I’ve been drinking a lot more water lately and have been drawn to eating lots of fresh fruit and vegetables. Especially at night, if I do eat anything, I’ll just take a fruit or two.

Reading other peoples experiences, they seem to suggest that to succeed at polyphasic sleeping it helps to be a vegetarian. I for one am not vegetarian, so it’ll be interesting to see how I fare. Then again, I’m not doing the full Uberman sleep schedule so maybe there’s a difference. Maybe the Everyman sleep schedule allows for non-vegetarians too.

While I am on that subject, if I do succeed in adapting to this, it would be interesting for me as an experiment to see if I can adapt to the full Uberman schedule after doing this for a while. Would it be easier than trying to go full-bore into Uberman? I haven’t heard of anyone who has tried that yet. If you’ve done this and you’re reading this, post a comment letting me know what your experience was like. I’d really be interested.

It would make sense that it would be easier to adapt, since with the Everyman sleep schedule you still need to train your body to reach the important REM stage in a 20-min sleep session. I’m curious to know how dependent the body becomes on that 3-hour core sleep session. Would it be difficult, after adapting to Everyman, to simply cut the 3-hour core and replace it with three more 20-min naps spread evenly throughout the day? That remains to be seen. Since the typical sleep cycle is 1.5 hours maybe I could progress to Uberman in stages by replacing the 3-hour core sleep session with a 1.5 hour one and adding an extra nap. If that works well then I could transition completely over to Uberman.

While that is interesting, full Uberman is still not possible with my schedule. But now that I think about it, maybe I could do my standard three naps at 7am, 12pm, and 7pm and then take three more at 10pm, 1am and 4am. From Steve Pavlina’s experience, I know that you have some flexibility in when you can take the naps — the key is just not to miss them.