How To Work While You Sleep
"Never go to sleep without a request to your subconscious." - Thomas Edison
You’ve probably heard the story of the shoemaker and the elves. It goes something like this: a poor shoemaker once had so little leather that he could only make a single pair of shoes. That evening, he went to bed with some work unfinished. The next morning, much to his amazement, he found the shoes ready and perfectly well-made on his workbench. So it continues: every night, he leaves out materials and returns to find dexterously-crafted shoes the next day. Turns out, there are benevolent elves working behind the scenes.
Thought experiment: what if there were such elves for other kinds of work? Math problems, hiring issues, writing articles? What if you could just lay out the problem at night and return to find the answer magically waiting in the morning?
Guess what: it’s possible. In fact, some of the world’s most productive people get much of their work — especially creative work — done this way. At night, in their sleep. With dedication and practice, you can too. Here’s how.
In the evening, outline a specific problem you are facing.
Josh Waitzkin calls this the ‘most important question’ (MIQ).
This can be concrete: should I hire the candidate I interviewed today?
It can even be more abstract: where do I want to be in the next 5 years?
Or it can be somewhere in between: what risks to my investment portfolio am I possibly overlooking?
Whatever the case may be, write it down, preferably in a diary dedicated to this task.
He [Reid Hoffman] might write down “a key thing that I want to think about: a product design, a strategy, a solution to a problem that one of my portfolio companies is looking at,” or something else he wants to solve creatively before an upcoming meeting.
— Tim Ferriss, in Tools of Titans
Think of the key parameters and variables that relate to the problem.
What factors would you weigh heavily in your decision?
A candidate’s prior work experience? Feedback from their former colleagues? Their fit with your organisation’s culture?
What form might a possible solution take?
Is a certain math problem likely to involve proof by contradiction? Proof by induction? Recursion?
What are the kinds of key things that might be constraints on a solution, or might be the attributes of a solution, and what are tools or assets I might have?
— Reid Hoffman
Once you register these, enforce a work shutdown for the day.
Don’t think about work. The more you do, the more you’ll get caught up in your own entanglements.
Pursue what Cal Newport calls high-quality leisure. This is leisure achieved in a deliberate, purposeful manner (ergo, no Netflix or smartphone).
For me, this is typically tennis or swimming.
A relaxed state is not achieved instantaneously at the turn of a switch. It comes gradually, so aim to shutdown from work at least a couple of hours before your bedtime.
Reflect on the problem first thing in the morning.
Don’t check email, messages or the news. Doing this pre-input is key, since it’s when your mind is a fresh slate.
That way you can bring out your most pure, untainted thinking, and bridge the gap between the conscious and unconscious mind.
The very first thing I do when I get up, almost always, is to sit down and work on that problem [I’ve set the day before] because that’s when I’m freshest. I’m not distracted by phone calls and responses to things, and so forth. It’s the most tabula rasa—blank slate—moment that I have. I use that to maximize my creativity on a particular project.
— Reid Hoffman
I myself began practicing this technique a few months back, and I’m surprised at the number of times I’ve woken up to astonishingly rich insights. From tricky math proofs to writing articles like this one, MIQ training — or working in my sleep — has helped me tremendously.
And then I started becoming aware of something else that was interesting. And very odd, too. If I wrote a sketch by myself in the evening, I'd often get stuck, and would sit there at my little desk, cudgeling my brains. Eventually I'd give up go to bed. And in the morning, I'd wake up and make myself a cup of coffee, and then I'd drift over to the desk and sit at it, and, almost immediately, the solution to the problem I'd been wrestling with the previous evening... became quite obvious to me! So obvious that I couldn't really understand why I hadn't spotted it the night before. But I hadn't.
This is how I began to discover that, if I put the work in before going to bed, I often had a little creative idea overnight, which fixed whatever problem it was that I was trying to deal with. It was like a gift, a reward for all my wrestling with the puzzle...
Then think of one of the greatest scientists of all time, Edison, the man who invented the light bulb. He found that he got his best ideas in that funny no man's land between being awake and being asleep. So he used to sit in a comfy armchair with a few ball bearings in his hand and a metal bowl underneath. When he dropped off to sleep his hand relaxed, the ball bearings fell on to the plate and the noise they made woke him up. He'd then pick up the ball bearings again and sit back and get into that same drowsy, dreamy frame of mind that he'd just been in.
— John Cleese, in Creativity
As someone who obsesses over learning and ideas, I’m fascinated by how creative insights arise. What MIQ practice shows is the importance of wandering, exploring, harnessing the power of the subconscious mind.
I remember sitting on a Bermuda cliff one stormy afternoon, watching waves pound into the rocks. I was focused on the water trickling back out to sea and suddenly knew the answer to a chess problem I had been wrestling with for weeks. Another time, after completely immersing myself in the analysis of a chess position for eight hours, I had a breakthrough in my Tai Chi and successfully tested it in class that night.
— Josh Waitzkin, in The Art of Learning
With MIQ training, the key is to experiment. Try various routines and see what works for you. As legendary futurist Ray Kurzweil writes in his book, Transcend-
The key to the process is to let your mind go, to be nonjudgmental, and not to worry about how well the method is working. It is the opposite of a mental discipline. Think about the problem, but then let ideas wash over you as you fall asleep. Then in the morning, let your mind go again as you review the strange ideas that your dreams generated. I have found this to be an invaluable method for harnessing the natural creativity of my dreams.
Safe to say, the idiom ‘sleep on it’ contains great wisdom!
For more on this idea, check out this wonderful post on the ‘creative night shift’.
Feedback and reading recommendations are invited at malhar.manek@gmail.com