Peter Fisher's shared items
I am the kind of person who takes 30 minutes to an hour to fall asleep, most nights. Falling asleep is an ordeal for me (unless I’m completely exhausted). Don’t get me wrong – it’s not an unpleasant ordeal… there are worse things in life than lying in bed. But I truly envy those people who can just put their head on a pillow and drift off within moments. Oh, such bliss… not for me. I will lie in bed, awake, forever thinking and rethinking whatever happens to be on my mind at the time.
Because of this, I always thought that power napping was not for me. After all, power naps are supposed to last about 20 minutes, and you don’t need to be a maths genius to realise that if it takes you at least half an hour to fall asleep, 20 minutes won’t be enough. So, therefore, I thought, since I can’t fall asleep quickly, I can’t nap.
Fortunately for me, I was completely wrong about this.
Napping isn’t sleeping
The reason I was wrong is, napping is not sleeping. To get the benefit of a refreshing power nap, you don’t need to fall asleep. It’s enough to relax yourself and let your thoughts drift off, even while remaining mostly awake. If you can do this properly (it does take some practice), you can power nap even if you find it impossible to fall asleep quickly.
I learned how to nap when I was starting my first start-up, while still working full time at Accenture. It was a pretty hard time for me, and I was constantly tired. Learning to nap allowed me to keep performing in both my job (during the daytime) and my start-up (in the morning and evening), despite my chronic lack of sleep. It’s great to be able to magically transition from a state of mind-numbing exhaustion into a fresh, wakeful mind, in just 20 minutes.
Pzizz
The way I learned to nap was with a tool called Pzizz. What Pzizz does is to generate soundtracks for your nap. They use a fancy thing called a binaural beat, combined with a hypnotherapy track, to help pull you into the depth of a good nap. When I tried Pzizz, I discovered, to my surprise, that I could listen to it for 15, 20 minutes, while sitting on a bench (or hiding in the toilet at work), and when it was over, I felt completely refreshed, ready to face several more hours of work.
All I needed was to have one of those tracks on my iPod, and bingo – I could gain the benefit of naps even though, as I knew, it was impossible for me to nap.
Pzizz without the Pzizz
Fast forward a couple of years. I don’t use Pzizz anymore, but I now nap up to three, four times a day, whenever I feel a wave of drowsiness overpowering me.
After quitting my Accenture job, I went through a phase where I tried to nap without Pzizz. At first, what I found is that most of my naps were refreshing, but not as refreshing as if I’d used Pzizz. But the important difference from before I’d tried Pzizz was that I knew what I was aiming for. With practice, I eventually got my Pzizz-less naps to be just as effective as they’d been with Pzizz – better, even, since now I don’t need to wear headphones or listen to a distracting voice while napping.
Now, I can nap in almost any position where I can relax (lying across two chairs mostly works, though I still much prefer a couch or a bed). I can even nap in a relatively noisy environment (so long as the noise isn’t someone speaking). Within 20 minutes, I will drift off to a zone where I don’t feel like I’m asleep, but my brain is actually pretty much in the REM zone (it feels like dreaming awake). After those 20 minutes, my alarm clock will wake me up, feeling refreshed, and that feeling lasts for up to several hours.
As a final step, I’m now practicing napping without an alarm clock. It’s going well so far.
So, what should you do to learn to nap?1
I think most people should be able to get from “completely unable to nap” to “can nap in most circumstances” within a few months. It took me about 6 months to get it consistently right without any hypnotic tracks, earplugs, or other aides.
The hardest hurdle to get across is, I believe, just realising that napping isn’t sleeping, and that you can learn to nap even if it takes you ages to fall asleep. Hopefully this article got that point across.
Next, you need to learn what to aim for. Until you’ve had a successful nap-like experience, it’s pretty hard to practice it. The way I learned that was with Pzizz. You may find different, perhaps better ways to learn that (please do share them in the comments). Some ideas include meditation classes and hypnotherapy recordings. There are also a number of binaural beat applications on the iPhone, including some free ones, but I haven’t yet found one that worked to my satisfaction (that said, I haven’t looked that hard).
The best way I can describe the feeling of napping is that you lie down or sit somewhere, and first focus on relaxing. Relax your muscle groups one by one, from your neck all the way down to your toes. Take a good minute or two to do this properly. Then finally you relax your thoughts. Let them drift off. It’s important to gently nudge those thoughts towards more relaxing topics – you won’t nap very well if you’re rehearsing a conversation with the boss – but at the same time, they need to largely drift on their own. Keep your eyes closed, your body relaxed, and let your thoughts meander from subject to subject without much order.
Once you’ve learned what to aim for, it’s just a matter of practicing it. It takes time (you can only nap a few times each day!), but it’s very rewarding.
Some final thoughts on napping
First of all, don’t go over your 20 minute target. You may find that your target window is slightly shorter or slightly longer, but whatever you do don’t over-sleep. This is a good article on the subject. When your alarm clock rings, get up, even if you feel drowsy for the first few moments. If you stay down, you risk going from the REM sleep mode into slow-wave sleep, which would require you to stay in bed for 90-120 minutes before your sleep cycle is complete. If you get up, the drowsiness will vanish in a minute or two.
So, paradoxically, napping longer makes you drowsy, not rested.
With 3-4 power naps through the day, I’ve found that I could, on occasion, drastically reduce my need for sleep. I’ve done it for a week or two at a time, basically sleeping only about 2-4 hours a night, without any apparent ill-effects during the day. I’m still undecided as to whether that’s something that I can or want to pursue as a longer term lifestyle change. Polyphasic sleep has its benefits and its drawbacks.
Another point worth highlighting is that napping is not just a cure for drowsiness. It’s also simply a way to make yourself more alert. And, importantly, it works, and feels, far better than any caffeinated drink. If you have a choice between drinking a strong coffee or having a 20 minute nap, always take the nap – you’ll feel more alert and smarter after the nap, and its after-effects will last longer.
Finally, the Wakemate guys inform me that it is also possible to do a 90-120 minute nap, which goes through a full sleep cycle. The difficulty there is to get the wake-up time right. Apparently their product should be able to help with that. We’ll see (I’m signed up to get a unit when they ship!)…
In summary
TL;DR? Here’s the Cliff notes:
- You don’t have to actually fall asleep to nap – it’s enough to drift off to a half-sleep state
- Even if it normally takes you 30+ minutes to fall asleep, you can benefit from 20 minute power naps
- First, learn what you’re aiming for, for example by using something like pzizz
- Then, practice reproducing that feeling – plan for a few months before you get good at it
- Don’t over-sleep when power-napping, it will only make you feel groggy
Good luck with your napping! I would love to hear your comments below, especially if you have more tips for people who are trying to learn to nap.
1 Please note that the approach I present here is what worked for me. I’m sure there are as many different approaches to learning to nap as there are people in the world. This is not meant to be a scientific guide to napping, merely an inspirational description of one approach that worked.
Thanks to Scott Wheeler, Yousef Syed, Greg Nemeth and Mike Gunderloy for reviewing a draft of this article, and particular thanks for Colin Curtin for needling me into finally publishing it!
My latest two videos are up at Fast Company: one's on firewalling your attention with time blocking, and the second is on three ways to use Google Wave in your business.
The time blocking piece is actually a personal confession about my hermit tendencies. Sometimes I just shut everything off, fall off the face of the planet, and have some uninterrupted me-time. I've had co-workers say to me, "Um, where did you go today?" and the answer is usually "To my happy place, a distraction-free zone." As you'll hear in the video, at my last office job, I actually used to schedule a meeting with myself complete with a conference room to get away and focus on something for awhile. Here's the 2 minute, 37 second clip.
Read the whole script at Fast Company: Avoid Office Distractions with Time Blocking.
The second clip is my quick answer to the age-old question about Google Wave: "But what do you actually use it for?" Here are three use cases for Wave in your business.
To dive deeper into Wave use cases, check out 8 more in Chapter 10 of The Complete Guide to Google Wave.
Platform shifts happen every decade or so in computing. The leaders of the previous generation are rarely successful in dominating the next generation platform. IBM dominated the mainframe business. They didn’t lose their dominance because another company built a better mainframe. They lost it because the market shifted to a new platform…Mini computers. Digital Equipment, Data General, and a few others dominated that market. Another platform shift is happening today, from PCs to Mobile devices, and another industry leader will be left behind. John Herlihy of Google Europe says “In three years time desktops will be irrelevant”
The future of computing is that your cell phone will become your primary computer, communicator, camera, and entertainment device, all in one. The exciting new applications are running in the browser, with application code and data in the cloud, and the cell phone as a major platform. I think in the near future there will be docking stations everywhere with a screen and a keyboard. You simply pull out your phone, plug it into the docking station, and instantly all your applications and data are available to you. You can connect to the Internet via your cell phone service, WiFi hotspot, or wired connection. Your phone will have enough storage so you can decide which applications and data are stored on your phone, and which will be in the cloud. Replication will work seamlessly in the background so that you always have a backup copy of your data in the cloud. Where does that leave the PC industry leaders? Scrambling towards mobile.
Why do leaders fail to adapt? The Innovators Dilemma, made famous by Clayton Christensen, clearly explains why market leaders fail to make the leap. Innovation usually happens at the low end of the market where the products are simple, prices are low, margins thin, and the market totally undefined. The industry leaders have great margins, high prices, and customers who want more features and are willing to pay for them. The industry leaders always move up market and leave the new emerging market to smaller innovators. The process usually follows these 6 steps;
- The disruptive technology is discovered, often by the market leading company.
- Marketing people seek reactions from customers and industry analysts.
- Established companies decide it is a better strategy to speed up the pace of sustaining technical advancement in their own product rather than go down market with the disruptive technology.
- Start-ups learn about the disruptive technology and see opportunity. They keep their cost structure low, build the technology, and find new markets through trial and error.
- The start-ups get some initial success and then move up market and eat away customers from the market leading company.
- The market leading company finally jumps on the bandwagon reluctantly with a half hearted attempt and fails. It is too late.
Giants don’t die quickly – IBM dominated the mainframe computer business in the 60’s and 70s. They didn’t make the shift to Mini-computers until it was too late. They did finally make the transition from a hardware company to a professional services company and IBM is still a very successful, but different company.
Digital Equipment, Data General, Hewlett Packard, Sun Microsystems, and others attacked IBM from the low end with Mini-computers and Workstations. They didn’t try to build a better mainframe. They moved the market to lower end, cheaper, faster, computing models. I worked at Digital Equipment in the late 80’s when they had over 130,000 employees and billions in revenue. However, when the platform shift to PCs happened none of these industry leaders made the leap fast enough. None of these companies exist today. (Update) Actually, Hewlett Packard does exist today as HP, and is better known for printers...and PCs.
The platform shift to PCs was ironically started by IBM. However, they quickly lost the lead to Compaq, Dell, and others. The real winner in the PC platform shift was Microsoft. Microsoft dominated the PC software business in the 80s and 90s, and extended that dominance into server software like Windows Server, SQL Server, and Sharepoint. Will Microsoft lose its dominance to a competitor that builds a better desktop Operating System? Some would argue that Apple did with the Mac, but Microsoft still has over 90% market share. Another proof point that market leaders don’t lose their dominance to competitors…they lose it to market shifts. Like IBM, Microsoft will be a financially strong company for many years to come. But, an innovator and industry leader?
Platform shifts have 10X the number of devices and users. The move to Mobile is big and fast. Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley says Mobile Internet usage is bigger than most people think, and it is exploding. Every platform shift has 10X the number of devices and users. There were about 1M mainframes, 10M mini-computers, 100M PCs, and 1 Billion cell phones. The next wave of mobile devices will be over 10B.
Think about the mobile phone you had in 1999, just a little over 10 years ago. Mine was a Motorola StarTac flip phone. It was state of the art at the time, but it had no camera, no email, no text messaging, no web browsing…just a phone. Now think about where mobile devices will be in 10 years. The iPhone you have today will feel like the StarTac of 10 years ago.
There will be an explosion in mobile bandwidth too. Again, think about the Internet access you had 10 years ago…probably 56K dial up or 128K ISDN. Today broadband is nearly universal. With the roll out of the 700Mhz wireless spectrum over the next 5 years we will see an explosion in mobile bandwidth just like we did from dial up to broadband. This will enable amazing new mobile applications and businesses.
Google’s big bets on the future of computing line up perfectly with the vision of “exciting new applications are running in the browser (Chrome), with application code and data in the cloud (Gmail, Google Apps, Google App Engine), and the cell phone as a major platform (Android). Oh, and that web search thing looks like it will be big too. :-0
Will history repeat itself? Will the previous platform leaders (PCs) fail to make the leap to lead the new Mobile platform shift? Will it happen in three years? All good questions that are open to debate. The direction seems clear, it is just a matter of time.
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Crashing through thin ice into frigid water is an extremely precarious situation to be in—increase your odds of survival with this guide.
Photo by Treefell.
Over at the how-to site wikiHow they have an 11-point guide to surviving an unplanned crash through thin ice. Their tips cover everything from how to fall into the water once the ice is already giving way to what to do once you're in the water. We'd recommend reading the whole guide, but one of the points they highlight more than once is to focus your escape route on where the ice is strongest:
Roll away from the hole. Don't stand up right away. The ice around the hole may be weak, so you want to distribute your weight over as much area as possible. Roll away from the hole or crawl on your belly until you are several feet from the hole. After that, you can crawl on your hands and knees until you are certain you are out of danger. Only then should you stand up.
In a worst case scenario where you can't get out of the hole, do your best to position yourself on the edge of the ice so that if you should pass out you won't sink and you'll remain visible to anyone who could call for help. Check out the full guide for additional tips and if you have you own experiences or advice on the topic, sound off in the comments.
First, this attack was not just on Google. As part of our investigation we have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses--including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors--have been similarly targeted. We are currently in the process of notifying those companies, and we are also working with the relevant U.S. authorities.
Second, we have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Based on our investigation to date we believe their attack did not achieve that objective. Only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed, and that activity was limited to account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line, rather than the content of emails themselves.
Third, as part of this investigation but independent of the attack on Google, we have discovered that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users' computers.
We have already used information gained from this attack to make infrastructure and architectural improvements that enhance security for Google and for our users. In terms of individual users, we would advise people to deploy reputable anti-virus and anti-spyware programs on their computers, to install patches for their operating systems and to update their web browsers. Always be cautious when clicking on links appearing in instant messages and emails, or when asked to share personal information like passwords online. You can read more here about our cyber-security recommendations. People wanting to learn more about these kinds of attacks can read this Report to Congress (PDF) by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission (see p. 163-), as well as a related analysis (PDF) prepared for the Commission, Nart Villeneuve's blog and this presentation on the GhostNet spying incident.
We have taken the unusual step of sharing information about these attacks with a broad audience not just because of the security and human rights implications of what we have unearthed, but also because this information goes to the heart of a much bigger global debate about freedom of speech. In the last two decades, China's economic reform programs and its citizens' entrepreneurial flair have lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese people out of poverty. Indeed, this great nation is at the heart of much economic progress and development in the world today.
We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that "we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China."
These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered--combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web--have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.
The decision to review our business operations in China has been incredibly hard, and we know that it will have potentially far-reaching consequences. We want to make clear that this move was driven by our executives in the United States, without the knowledge or involvement of our employees in China who have worked incredibly hard to make Google.cn the success it is today. We are committed to working responsibly to resolve the very difficult issues raised.
Update: Added a link to another referenced report in paragraph 5.
Posted by David Drummond, SVP, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer
This is an important blog post. Go read it from the source.
Update: David Drummond from Google appears on CNBC to discuss the situation more.
Also, Google just made it so that Gmail defaults to https. This means that even if you use a public wifi hotspot, you’ll have an encrypted tunnel for the communication between your browser and Google. This makes your email much more secure against sniffing or snooping.
Moving on to our top five Dezeen stories from September 2009, this shoe with no foot plate by London architect Julian Hakes, called the Mojito Shoe, was at number one. (more…)
We knew that the holidays were going to be super busy for iPhone developers — in a good way. Gaming community platform PlayHaven and mobile ad exchange Mobclix released data yesterday saying that iPhone game usage is likely to set record in the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, called a “Game Rush,” with usage 28 times greater than the same weekly period last year.
One developer, Oliver Cameron of Taptivate, the developer of Voices (an application that morphs your voice into different sounds like Darth Vader, Chipmunks, etc), sent me an email saying that sales have been through the roof for them, and their app is now in the 44th spot because of the “Game Rush” as they’re calling it. It’s one of those “it’s stupid but fun” kind of apps that usually move well when people are looking for quick apps to download.
Cameron mentioned that sales were as high as 18,769 downloads of the $0.99 app on December 25th. So if you do the math, that’s $18,581.31 in sales, not including Apple’s 30% cut. If you included Apple’s cut, the app made $12,688 in one day. Those are some pretty crazy numbers, regardless. Check out a graph of Voice’s sales numbers below as well.
The app in total has made a little more then $250,000 sales, which got me thinking: If this app is #44 on the App Store, imagine what the number one and two apps were doing (Skee-Ball and Live Cams). We also just spoke with Colin Smith, Vice President of Freeverse, which said that their application, Skee-Ball sold 47,926 units — which is about 10x what it did the previous Friday. Another one of their apps, Flick Fishing, sold 31,741 units on Christmas day.
We’re also hearing that an app which has been one of the most popular since the launch of the App Store 18 months ago, saw its downloads on Christmas Day double its previous record for a single day.
All of this could well point to the possibility that Apple itself set a record in the amount of iPhones and iPod Touches sold during the holiday season.
Update: More numbers are coming in. Lima Sky’s Doodle Jump, which just hit the 1 million download mark about a week ago, managed to sell 80,000 units on Christmas day alone. Two days prior, they were pushing around 15,000 per day; two days later, they were hovering around 35,000. All in all, they sold 197,821 copies between 12/23 and 12/27 – at .99c a pop, we’re calculating that they took in just shy of $139,000 after Apple’s cut.
Update: Even more numbers to report as Tapulous, developers of the popular Tap Tap Revenge series, check in with good news. They’ve pulled down over 2 million installs of Tap Tap Revenge 3 since going free last Wednesday, 700,000 of which came on Christmas day. Between Tap Tap Revenge 1/2/3 and the Metallica/Lady GaGa editions, Tapulous now has 5 applications in the Top 100 grossing apps.
Update: SGN reports that last week, their best selling game F.A.S.T. hit the 1 million download mark and doubled its install rate since launching the free version, “The New War”. It also got up to #22 App Rank only 5 days after launch. You can check out our coverage of F.A.S.T. here.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
US designers SchultzeWORKS have designed a desktop PC inspired by television designs from the 1950s. (more…)
