What are some way to increase productivity with a sleeping disorder?

Question

This is a long one and I apologize in advance:

In my late teens, I was diagnosed with non-24-hour circadian rhythm disorder. In short, my body believes each day is longer than 24 hours and I don't become naturally tired at the same time each day. To boot, the presence of the sun makes no difference one way or the other.

I've dealt with that by being a freelance programmer. Not having a preset daily schedule helped a great deal. I didn't have to dose myself with caffeine to stay awake during the day, thus degrading my abilities. (Sadly, it does sometime cause problems in relationships.)

Still, I've always had trouble sticking to even a loose schedule. And while I'm aware that's more of a personal problem than one caused by the disorder, I'm highly effective when my sleeping schedule aligns such that I can follow events in iCal or Google Calendar. Except during such alignments, it's practically useless to keep a standard calendar. For one, I get alerts at wrong times--or miss a slew-- and two, having to constantly rearrange/recalculate all the events is a time-consuming pain. And simply having a complex to-do list (which I do, I use an app called Process) isn't the answer because there are no consistent multi-stage deadlines to fight, thus diluting the deadline stress motivator.

So my basic question is the title: What are some way to increase productivity with a sleeping disorder?

Asides:

• Are there calendar solutions that cope with sleeping disorders?
• Are there resources for people such as myself that I don't know about? Support groups, books, etcetera.

Answer 1

I suspect that you are making things VASTLY too complicated. If you know you can't keep a calendar, then minimize those things that are in your calendar. With only a few things in your calendar, you can plan most of the things (medical appointments, client visits) match your cycle, and suck it up for the few that need to be during your sleep cycle.

For comparative purposes, the "standard" work schedule is 40 hours per week, or roughly 25% of the number of hours in a week. The standard work cycle is 8 hours per cycle, or 33% of the hours in a cycle. You arrange your working time (roughly) within those guidelines, although most programmers work far more hours than that.

More important, when you are awake and working, you need to be working on the correct things. You need a system to track tasks and identify the next one to work on. I like Getting Things Done, which can be implemented in just about every program, including "Process" I imagine.

When you need to be awake at a time when your body thinks it should be sleeping, you need to be awake. Get an alarm clock, or perhaps use a wake-up-call service (such as Wakerupper).

If the issue is one of staying on task or keeping focus, perhaps you should try Pomodoro, which is a technique to put work into short, focused time periods.

Answer 2

If your non-24-hour day is the same number of hours each "day" for you, you could program yourself a simple calendar app that assume a "day" is your own body's rhythm rather than 24 hours. It could export an iCal feed or something if you want the events to show up on moe widely supported calendarig tools.

Answer 3

A couple of ideas on the calendar issue:

1) Would switching your timezone every day, on calendars that support that, work? I think it could, depending on the implementation...

2) If most of the things you have scheduled can be done with a few hours' leeway, what about just setting up a calendar with email reminders and then dealing with the emails whenever it works with your sleep schedule? Or do you have too many tasks for that to be doable?