Theory of Sleep Management

The best thing you learn at a B-School is "Time Management"

Ok, there were so many MBA's out there who said that to me. But that was before I joined a B-School, now that I have joined one of the best ones around, I have realised that its not at all about time. It's about something which we all enjoy doing, SLEEPING.

This is what David Allen says on Time Management (first thing on Wiki page of this topic),

You can't manage time, it just is. So "time management" is a mislabeled problem, which has little chance of being an effective approach. What you really manage is your activity during time, and defining outcomes and physical actions required is the core process required to manage what you do.

We will try to rephrase it in context of Sleep through the length of this post. Anyway coming back to a B-School, in between all the subjects, quizzes, assignments, those group works, lectures, hostel, everything involves a bit of sleep. There is no more physical exercise (except the stupid dancing sessions we have at Boy's Hostel sometime), it all about giving rest to your mind. Although sleep does provide for Physical Exercise, you can sleep on sides, straight, upside down (as I do nowadays), also while sleeping in classroom, you can bend your neck which is highly effective against neck pain, then you can stretch your elbows and press your cheeks against those cold tables....Ahaa

People sleep in Class, thats a universal fact, the first time I slept in class was post school though, that was at a FIITJEE center New Delhi where I went for a IIT crash course. By the way I also slept while working on a B-Plan(plan related to IIT's) recently.

Also you find variety of people obsessed with sleeping in different ways, my friend hasodi here asked me yesterday to ping her every half hour to keep her awake, but she slept before the first ping happened, then you see a nice chirpy fellow on the 3rd floor of my hostel who I have seldom seen fully awake, and then there is this lady here, who asks questions while she is sleeping, and a Happy Sardar who just ensures that his eyes turn tomatoes but he doesn’t sleep.

I have my own unique style, its like a camera shutter, those eyes behind those specs of mine ( I have broken two since coming to Mumbai) shut on and off. Its basically my mind which tries to sleep, but somewhere there is that conscious which tells me, come on Desi, you should listen to the lecture, you should study. What finally gets through the mind is my favourite dish, khichdi.

Any activity at a B-School and you need to cut down on your sleep, not on your time, although it might be related but I believe sleep and food are related to productivity than no other thing. A chain ki neend ensures proper completion of activities and better concentration. Now this is what the experts say, the more I sleep at night, the more I sleep in classes is the relationship I have observed.

To summarise, your stay at B-School is a function of Sleep Management and not time.

Success = K X SleepFactor

Where K is a correction factor, for me its food, for some others it maybe finding a girlfriend at B-School etc etc. Sleepfactor is a number calculated on the basis of hours you sleep. Its basically an average number of hours slept for a particular time period. Although I am not sure whether this may follow inferential statistics and this maybe extended to the overall Success over two years...

Enough of all this bakwaas, let us try to reframe the theory I quoted at the beginning,

You can't manage SLEEP, it just comes to you naturally. So "sleep management" is a mislabeled problem, which has little chance of being an effective approach. What you really manage is your activity during SLEEP(read dreaming, asking questions etc.), and defining the number of hours of sleep, and your outcomes and external factors required(read mattress, tables, chairs, music while sleeping etc.) required is the core process required to manage how you sleep.

I just feel while publishing this that this is my worst post ever, totally irrelevant and useless, Dahi Vada and Aalasya, aahaa, those were the days.