Have you got enough sleep?

I sleep a lot, terribly too much.

I sleep 7 hours everyday on weekdays, and slightly more on weekend. I know there are many people who sleep just 5 hours everyday. I must be wasting a lot of time, and I feel very guilty about it.

I don’t always sleep so much, though. A few years ago, when I was a contract engineer for Ericsson in California, I worked nights for many months. Unfortunately, I wasn’t a person who could sleep well during the days, and found it hard to re-adjust to ‘normal life’ on the weekend. I nodded off many times when I was driving back to my hotel after 6 am, and overshot the freeway exit once.

We (the engineers) usually worked from Monday to Friday, but occasionally the clients asked us to work from Sunday to Thursday so that they could be off on Friday evening. We worked at night in order to minimize the impact of possible disruption to cellular networks.

In December that year, Ericsson and one of its clients wanted to close accounts, and the engineers were told to complete as many projects as possible. We worked days and nights, and were soon very exhausted. (Less risky tasks were done during the day.) Then, something went wrong. There was a network outage. Ericsson and the client hold a teleconference to discuss this incident. There were lots of hoo-hah and finger-pointing. Finally, an enlightened manager from the client side said something which I still remember after so many years, “Do not overwork. If you are tired, you make mistake.”

Tell us how many hours you sleep everyday. Do you think you are sleep-deprived?