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by Laurent Bossavit.
Original Post: Power naps
Feed Title: Incipient(thoughts)
Feed URL: http://bossavit.com/thoughts/index.rdf
Feed Description: You're in a maze of twisty little decisions, all alike. You're in a maze of twisty little decisions, all different.
I am freshly woken up from my occasional afternoon nap. My brain woke up before I did. I often hit the Snooze button for an extra five minutes of sleep - this time an idea occurred to me - about a topic for a workshop submission at the SPA conference, the deadline to which is today. It developed into a full-blown train of thought, and before I knew it I was getting up, stretching my legs and turning off the alarm clock feature on my cell phone, ready for the keyboard.
For the past two years rather sporadically, I have been taking "power naps", so-called - very short stretches of sleep at the ebb of my energy cycle, which is usually shortly after lunch.
The main reason I started taking naps is that for a parents naps can have survival value; my wife and I tended to nap - from exhaustion - when the baby was having his. The reason they have remained sporadic is that it's a habit that's too easy to fall out of; and power-napping isn't at all the same as taking a long (1 hour or more) nap because the alternative is spending the rest of the day snapping at the other kids. It's supposed to be a discipline for mental focus, which is my main interest in it. For a while I toyed with the idea of researching the topic, and even of proposing a workshop on power-napping to a conference. (AYE could be a good venue.) I never did figure out how to solve the practical issues of such a workshop, which are... interesting.
For today, I'm content to have gleaned the following insight - you know it was an effective nap when your brain wakes up before you do, and it's the buzz of fresh ideas which pulls you out of your sleep.
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