My greatest fear in life is that I won’t be able to do the things I want to do. Maybe it sounds familiar to you, maybe it sounds kind of superficial, but the truth of the matter is I’m one of those few people that puts my long-term goals before much else. So, good as I am at accomplishing life goals (I’ve managed to finish 22 in the last 18 months and accrue over a dozen new ones), I still feel I’m selling myself short. I hate the idea of uni-tasking, especially when my list of life goals are so tantalising and exciting, yet every time I try to overdo it, no matter how detailed my plan of attack, I always burn out. We are just not used to implementing large-scale, long-term change or remembering more than 7 things at once; it just isn’t in our hardware. So, if you’re going to tackle a long list of areas you’d like to improve, you have to understand your limitations. Almost every self-help, personal development, and lifestyle design guru will tell you to narrow your range and pull your focus to one thing at a time, an approach I’ve spent my whole life fighting only to find it’s actually the best way to get things done. They tell you in great detail how to organise your list or how far away to put your deadlines, but no one ever explained to me why you can only chase after one habit right now. I never found a compelling enough reason to deviate from my do it all at once approach. Well, now that I’ve experienced some success at the unitasking method, I thought I’d let you know a few good reasons why you can really only do one thing at a time.

You know what happens when all the emails in your inbox are marked high priority? Not only do they all become equally unimportant, but you lose faith in the whole priority system. On top of that, it makes it so much easier to close your mail if you have 26 things you consider urgent instead of one nagging thing you needed to get done. The same thing happens when you try to tackle too many areas at once. The things you really want — to start a garden, to visit Paris, to run a marathon, whatever your goals — become lost in a mass of too many things, and it becomes overwhelming and far too easy to just turn your back on the stuff that matters to you most.

Moreover, life is hard enough. You’ve got to pay the bills and wash your garments, feed yourself and show up on time, and still find enough hours to sleep well and unwind so you don’t breakdown the next day. That’s nearly too many things to worry about already, never mind the limits on your money, your time, and more importantly your energy. You’ve only got so much energy, attention, and willpower to give, so you need to be ultra-discerning where you spend it. As much as I’d like to wallow every second of the day in my dreams, the truth is I have to go to work and I have to do my dishes and I have to sort through the mail. If I tried to learn more Japanese characters AND try new recipes to improve my cooking AND do 50 crunches every day, I wouldn’t have time or energy to go to work, do the dishes, or sort through mail, and I’d be in pretty hot water come the 31st. So instead I pick one of those things to work on, and make sure I can still function as a human being when I’m not quizzing myself on Kanji.

This is key. I’m not saying you should put stuff you don’t care about, like laundry or hoovering your carpet, before your dreams. I’m saying you need to take care of yourself first. You need to know your rent will be paid and your stomach full before you can worry about owning an Aston Martin. This is because you need to bring your A-game to make a change. You can’t be recovering from a stressful week at work and a bad head cold and expect to still hit the gym every day to start that new routine. It’s going to take an intense amount of energy to turn your dreams into reality, and you’re going to need a stable foundation to grow from, so recover first and hunker down second.

And it will take a surprising amount of energy. There will be lots of inertia to overcome, lots of emotional baggage and circumstantial barriers to surmount. It might be stressful at times, but these are dreams you really want, right? The effort should be worth it. Bottom line, you can’t put the same amount of effort into everything. You’re going to have to be a nazi about time drains, constantly asking yourself “is this really what I want to be doing right now?” You’re going to have to take the guesswork out of it when you reach that vital fork in the road: french fries or fruit? This is a lesson I learned from polyphasic sleep. I’ve always had trouble getting up in the morning, and though my goal was to adapt to a polyphasic schedule, when my alarm went off four hours after I fell asleep I seemed to conveniently forget that goal. I learned not to trust my 6am self and instead rely on my 6pm self to take away all my 6am self’s decision making authority. It wasn’t that I lacked discipline or motivation, it was that getting out of bed when you’re in desperate need of REM took more energy than my groggy, sleep-deprived, un-showered self could muster at sunrise. I did it though, because polyphasic sleeping was something I wanted, and it was worth every rough early morning. You have to know what you want, and concentrate your energies on getting it.

The really fiddly bit is that there will always be more things you want or need to put your effort into. Your trough will never be empty, your to-do list, never complete, so in the constant stream of desires and duties accomplishing anything feels rather anticlimactic. To combat the sense of futility that lets us give up on our dreams of having the Rock’s six pack or Linda Hamilton’s ass in T2, you have to find a way to make accomplishment satisfying. If you celebrate adopting an exercise regimen the same way you revel in returning a library book on time, you’re throwing a kink in what could be a huge motivator. Fulfilling your personal goal is not the same as finishing a household errand, so make that distinction as clear as possible and be clear about what really is a victory. If you aim for too many victories, they won’t be worth throwing a party for.

How do you pick which victories to aim for, then? I’m convinced most abandoned new years resolutions are due not to a lack of realism, but a lack of priorities. What really matters to you? Don’t answer right away. I’m not asking what you want off your plate right now, I’m asking what really matters to you. Make two lists. On the first list write down what you spend your time doing, starting with the piece that eats up the largest chunk of your time. On the second list write down what the most important things are to you. Compare. Is family your top priority yet you spend the most amount of time at work and playing golf with your buddies? Is travel your number one on the second list but keeping house the number one on the first? You don’t have to drastically redesign your life and hack the soul out of your time, the idea is to make you think about the relationship between where you want your priorities to lie and where you show the world they do. Perhaps the two need reconciling?

Okay, that little exercise was slightly unfair. Sometimes it is hard to even accurately judge such lists because certain tasks carry a heavy psychological weight we’re pretty good at pretending doesn’t exist. There’s that one thing you’re procrastinating that might even be a tiny, trivial task, like mailing a form or stopping by the DMV, but the longer you put it off, the greater the burden it becomes. Yet, in your brain you rationalise it, thinking it’s such a little thing that surely putting it off another week couldn’t do too much harm? WRONG. ABSOLUTELY WRONG. Just as having time isn’t nearly as important as using time wisely, the best judge of tasks and priorities is actually their emotional impact. Once you figure out the weight of each goal, then you simply tackle the one that’ll have the greatest emotional impact. It’s easier said then done, I know, and not just because quantifying your emotions comparatively is tricky, but because then you have to actually followthrough and take on that task, no matter how painful it may be. It might be painful, and it’s going to be hard, so if you try too many difficult things at once, you won’t have the emotional capacity to followthrough.

That’s of course the trickiest part, the followthrough. I could write a whole book on how we spend so much time planning and making lists and dreaming but rarely do we ever do. It’s not easy and there are many real barriers (like being unemployed) and many fake barriers (such as lacking discipline), but the reality is that pursuing your dreams is hard. That’s why you have to tackle them one at a time. If 16 burly footballers come at you, the goalie, simultaneously each armed with a soccer ball, you’d be the next Edwin Van Der Sarr if you could stop them all. Why? Because your dreams require all sorts of different things from you. Being well-rested requires you sleep in yet making breakfast every morning requires you to get up early, and while not all of your goals will be in direct conflict, they will all require you to, well, dive in different directions to get them. Unless you’re Van Der Sarr himself, trying to pursue all those various dreams at once will overwhelm you and probably cost you the game. So focus on one footballer and block that one ball. Focus on one dream so you can actually followthrough.

There’s a bonus in all of this though, because by concentrating your effort onto one individual task you A) find a focal point, a central aim about which you can obsess, let passion overrun, and inject excitement back into your life, and B) forget all about whether or not you fail and instead do. Even if the process of pursuing your dream to get free of debt means you won’t be seeing as many movies in the theatre as you’d like, the relief you’ll feel at being in the clear is far greater than any disappointment you could muster at missing Sherlock Holmes.

So do yourself a favour. Recover before you tackle anything, clear your plate and define your real priorities, make the right thing the only thing, remove the biggest emotional burden first or give yourself the biggest break first, but most of all, only do one thing at a time. That’s more than enough. Life is tough enough already.

Almost everyone who’s heard of polyphasic sleep thinks it’s both brilliant and insane. Well, in a nutshell, the idea is to sleep less, be awake more, and still get the same amount of actual rest (the REM sleep phase) as you would on an 8-hour, monophasic sleep cycle. Sounds ideal, right? That’s the sane part.  The crazy bit is your actual sleep schedule, the most famous of which involves sleeping for 20 minutes every 4 hours.  That equals 2 hours of down time out of every 24, and you’re still supposed to function like a normal human being for the 30 extra hours of wake time you’ve added to your week? With an execution that seems too dangerous to attempt and a payoff that sounds too good to be true, it’s no wonder polyphasic nappers appear to be totally off their rockers.

While there is precedent for polyphasic sleeping, most famously Leonardo DaVinci and Benjamin Franklin, there isn’t much of it.  The most extensive sources come from internet blogs and forums (a red flag if ever), and almost no research has been done on the long-term eaffects of polyphasic sleeping, mostly because not a lot of people actually DO polyphasic sleep in the long-term.  It’s difficult, it goes against what everyone else is doing, and it’s a huge adjustment to effectively double your waking hours so suddenly.  There’s also concern that there’s something about the 8-hour sleep process polyphasic sleepers will be missing that could ultimately hurt the body (sort of like how vegans and vegetarians have more health concerns because they don’t consume 7 essential amino acids that come from meat and meat by-products), just as easily as internal chemistry could be thrown by how so much waking darkness affects our circadian rhythms. But, as Steve Pavlina (another successful polyphasic sleeper) claims, the hardest part of any change is usually because your surroundings don’t support it. Yeah the world isn’t polyphasic, and that’ll always be the biggest deterrent. Of course, it doesn’t help that true polyphasic sleep is also really difficult to adapt to.  It requires an allegedly hellish few days of sleep deprivation before your body can fall neatly into the schedule, it mandates a huge psychological shift from having a quantifiable marker of days to now experiencing an endless flow of more or less uninterrupted hours, and it takes a certain type of personality to enjoy all the extra time, which is spent alone while the rest of the world is sleeping, let’s not forget. Polyphasic sleep, especially the 2-hours total model, is also really inconvenient.  The nap times are frequent and often inflexible, and most 9-5 jobs don’t allow for constant nap breaks, making it an extremely high-maintainence schedule.  If you’re in a mall, or a class, or a meeting, nipping out because you need to take a nap is some combination of both inconvenient and embarassing, not to mention oft impossible.

So why would anyone in their right mind do this? Polyphasic sleep has some pretty hefty benefits.  First of all, you gain six hours a day you are now spending NOT in bed while still feeling like you did.  In fact, the overhwelming majority of polyphasic sleepers feel BETTER — better rested, more awake and alert, with faster reflex times and more consistant moods — than they did as monophasic sleepers.  And if feeling superhero awesome and creating extra leisure time like a magician wasn’t enough, there are a bunch of other side perks to the process.  You become a lucid dreamer, and your dreams are more vivid and way easier to remember.  It’s easier to stay fit because your body’s in “I’m doing things!” metabolism more or less 24/7.  You will from then on be able to fall asleep anywhere with ridiculous ease.  And if you have any problems or anxieties about sleeping (e.g., insomnia, night terrors, restless leg syndrome, sleep apnea, and so forth), polyphasic sleep is said to cure all of them in one fell swoop. Well, I’ve done it, rather successfully if I do say so myself, and while I can attest to these perks, there’re quite a few amazing benefits beyond the obvious, five of which in particular are urging me to continue on the polyphasic path indefinitely:

If you think about it for a bit, monophasic sleep — sleeping in one single block daily — is a totally constructed modus operandi.  Yes, the majority of people in civilised society all go to their full night of rest once the sun goes down, but not everyone folows suit.  In fact, many indigenous groups believe humans are supposed to sleep in four-hour blocks twice a day, while scientists calculated the human internal clock’s ideal run-time is 31 hours to a day, not 24. We’ve all had sick days or aeroplane flights where we dozed in an out naturally.  Perhaps the best example of how polyphasic sleeping can work and can be a more natural schedule is infants.  Babies don’t sleep through the night, but instead have to take constant and semi-breif naps every few hours. Like a polyphasic sleeper.  And as a parent of a newborn, what are you advised to do? Sleep when the baby sleeps.  The idea of departing from the norm stems from our ability to toss and turn all night and not feel rested when you wake. Why is this? Because the essential part of sleeping, the bit where all the vital processes, dreams, and actual restoration occurs is in the REM cycle, or the fourth phase of sleep.  Normally, when you sleep for eight hours, you still only get a small amount of REM sleep, about only 1.5 or so hours.  With polyphasic sleep, you are teaching your body to get really good at going straight into REM sleep, so you’re actually getting the same amount if not more, without all that tedious mucking about in the theta phase. Furthermore, your body is self-regulating, so once it goes into REM overdrive, it eventually cycles back through all the phases of sleep again, depending on what your body needs at the time.  Essentially, polyphasic sleep is just a method to make sleep more efficient.

I don’t suggest polyphasic sleep for everyone, but if I haven’t scared you off with all the sciency mumbo jumbo and you’re still intrigued, than I’d urge to check it out. It’s fit my temperament and my personality so well that my quality of life has greatly improved since adapting to the schedule. You can read more about how I did it, and find some helpful resources about polyphasic sleep here.