“Knew we would crash at the speed that we were going
Didn’t care if the explosion ruined me…”
– Charlie Puth, “Dangerously”
The quote above is from a song that I’ve been listening to a fair bit recently, and I’ve picked up on those two lines although in a different context (as you might expect, the original song is concerned with a reaction to a breakup). I’ve been thinking about how my work practices could work in the longer term and what would be sustainable. Nonetheless, hearing those two lines makes me think of deep surges; some of the most short-term of these could perhaps take the form of all-nighters.
I’ve been fairly lucky in that I haven’t had to pull many all-nighters for quite some time. I think I only did this once for MCMAS-Dynamic (during the report-writing stage; generally given the technical complexity of the work I don’t think it would have made sense), and I don’t think I did one during the third year group project. I also remember having executed one during second year when revising for the exams, though that was thankfully well before said exam period. There have been several hackathons, of course, as well as other occasional personal surges but generally I find that I perform best if I have adequate sleep, and even in the relatively short run I’d be better off doing three say 15-hour days, punctuated by relatively normal sleep (well, as normal as that can be given such a schedule) than plugging away in a continuous stretch.
Anyway, besides the Charlie Puth song I’m also writing about this now because I voluntarily did one this week, though for a rather different reason: watching the US presidential election. I had a couple tabs open with various election newsfeeds and a couple watching market futures and GBPUSD. On hindsight I’m not sure exactly why I did it since it was pretty apparent midway through (I think around 2-3 am in London time) that things were going Trump’s way, and I wasn’t trading through the night (by the time markets opened in the morning there wasn’t too much of a cheap-buying opportunity). That’s a subject for another post, though.
I think the negative effects of sleep deprivation are well-documented; I’m not sure exactly why I pulled the all-nighter for the MCMAS-Dynamic report (probably wanted to rush something out for a supervisor meeting the next day), but I do distinctly remember that the two or three pages that I cranked out, while probably not bad per se fell particularly far short of my quality standards in a later proofread. The problem I’m trying to address with an all-nighter involves not having enough time to deal with a short-run (typically next-day) requirement, and in less extreme cases it’s not the only solution; where possible, I’d also like to try an alternative of waking up abnormally early to work on the issue. Understandably, there are risks that one might fail to actually wake up early, though I think this can be mitigated with suitable (read: loud and highly dissonant) alarms.
However, there are cases where I find this to be the best solution anyway. Some of this might involve external time constraints (for example, if it involves live following of current events – the aforementioned US election is one, or the recent World Series if one’s so inclined; examples from software engineering could include firing off long-running performance or integration tests, or meeting sudden customer requirements). Also, for suitably short time spans this is likely to be an optimal or near-optimal solution (even then, a 1.5 hour nap could potentially be useful in such cases). I think another useful factor to bear in mind would be the activities planned for next day (an exam or interview would be very bad, for instance).
Once the decision to forego sleep has been made, I usually don’t find the direct implementation of all-nighters to be too bad, perhaps because for things to have reached that point there must have been a compelling reason. Typically, by then the outcome-oriented side of me takes over and decides that it would be a night of crushing things (though it doesn’t always calculate the costs appropriately).
I think for me at least the most challenging part of this is managing its costs the next day. I personally don’t perform well if I haven’t had enough sleep, and there’s also a risk of overcorrection (that is, sleeping too early, which messes with the sleep schedule for the next few days). I guess caffeine can be deployed to some extent to address this, though I’ve been on the wrong side of that as well. I find that removing access to a bed at least until only a few hours before one’s normal bedtime can help as well – in fact, staying outside is probably even better (I can sleep on a chair if I’m at home).
In summary, it’s a very useful tool in my experience, and there are circumstances where it might be necessary or optimal, but generally speaking where possible this should be avoided.
