28h Days
Some time ago, I found myself with zero obligations to follow the usual daily routine: wake up in the morning and go to sleep at night (the “normal people schedule”). During my time awake, I was either working on side-projects or playing with my hobbies, and I’d go to sleep whenever I felt sleepy, wake up naturally (no alarms), and repeat. This led me to observe that without sticking to a daily routine, my sleep schedule would drift every day compared to the previous one. I also noticed that on most days I’d sleep a bit longer than 8h, sometimes 9h or even 10h.
I realised that this was happening because it took me longer to feel tired than the “normal people schedule” assumed. If I followed it, sleeping would tend towards napping until the tiredness built up, at which point I’d need to sleep more. In fact, for most of my adult life (especially when I had a full-time job), I’d always have to force myself to go to bed during weekdays, and naturally this drift would occur, and then I’d “reset” during the weekend (often 10h+ of sleep), thus going back to forcing myself to sleep on weekdays to stick to the routine.
If I could, I’d love to stick to this new routine that I found, which comes with no sleep schedule. However, I also want to spend some time with my friends and significant other during weekends (which is when they’re usually available). I can’t leave it to chance to be awake during weekends at the same time that they are, so I decided to experiment with something a bit different.
Given that I just wasn’t tired at all in the usual “sleep ~8h, be awake ~16h” routine, I decided to find a routine that would let me stay awake for longer, but still somehow match with normal people during weekends. And given that I’d be staying up longer, the new sleep schedule should account for longer sleep times as well.
A week has 7 days × 2 × 2 × 2 × 3 hours, so if I chose a divisor of this number, this would let me stick to some weekly routine, which is important so I can match with other people’s schedules every weekend. And given that my goal is to stay awake for longer than ~16h, I need something that gives me less than 7 days in the week, which leads to two possible options: 6 days of 28h each, or 4 days of 42h each. I decided to look at the reasonable option first and hope to find a way to organise my sleep schedule.
Turns out that it seems to work well! If I start my week on Monday at 04:00 and leave ~10h of sleep time each day, I’ll wake up around ~06:00 on Saturdays, and ~10:00 on Sundays, which seems perfect to enjoy weekends with other folks. Having 10h allocated for sleep means that I have plenty of time to rest. I expect that on many days I’ll still sleep the usual ~8h, which gives me extra hours to stay awake, in turn (I’m hoping) pushing me to sleep a bit longer the next day, thus achieving a faster balance than the 24h schedule.
This is the schedule I’ll start experimenting with, and will make entries on this blog with updates.
Bonus: creating a 28h clock
Once I was set on this 28h schedule, I realised it would help a lot to have a 28h clock, so I can tell when I should go to sleep and eat without having to remember or translate the 24h clock to my schedule’s.
Trying to get a 28h clock on an Android phone led me to realise that we have a lot of code to deal with different timezones and even different calendars, but almost everything I saw assumed a 24h day, which is interesting to think about, considering people want to go to the Moon and Mars.
I ended up creating a quick page to determine the time in my 28h day, and put it up here . I use it to check the 28h time on my phone. On my computer I have a script that does essentially the same thing and updates my system bar with the 28h time. The code currently can’t tell the time for days before my designated “day 0”, and it can’t do any calendar math either, but I’ll figure that out when/if I need it, and then might start a repository with some lib code to deal with different clocks.