http://xkcd.com/320/

Just sayin’. =P

Kinda. It depends on what you’re doing each day and how naturally intelligent you are.

If your mind never contemplates much more than what you’re going to be eating at next meal time and you work as a manual laborer, you probably won’t notice it much.

If you’re studying Japanese, you will start to hate Anki to the point that you destroy your computer. And you’ll be more likely to follow through with the destroying part. It’ll start to be like you’re drunk once you do for a certain length of time.

That said, there is nothing wrong with doing some of the things suggested, as long as it’s in the short term.

It’s simply not sustainable.

There’s also correlative data that suggests that people who sleep too little tend to die sooner.

That said I usually consider those types of studies to not be worth the paper they are wrote on, but…

Very interesting post :P. I was considering looking into polyphasic sleep patterns, after seeing my (very disjointed) timetable for this year. I suppose that idea’s going in the bin. Thanks for the links :D.

On the broad topic of “finding time”, I would imagine the best method is to review what you realistically spend time doing every day. I suspect when I get back to serious studying, I’ll need to reduce my internet forum/article reading habits ;_;.

@Ricardo: You maybe ought to email Koichi with this suggestion. I know he’s currently in the process of overhauling most of the site but I have a feeling it’s not something he’s probably thought much into, plus he doesn’t visit the forum any more so he won’t see this thread unless you specifically show it to him.

@Pantome: “I’ll need to reduce my internet forum/article reading habits ;_;” – I try to reduce procrastination pretty much every day but it never (or rarely ever) works out :P I did, however, have great success when I removed Cracked and Kotaku from my Facebook feed – it was ridiculous the amount of time I spent reading articles on those sites; they’re all so long and pointless! It took a while to “get around” to actually doing the deed – I thought I was enjoying reading them all and didn’t really want to quit, if you get me – but when I did, I realised that I really didn’t lose anything from it. I can safely say I’m quite content not knowing “The 5 most mind-blowing facts about X you probably didn’t realise!”. So much information that took so long to read and probably about 90% I’ll never use again or could even tell you an hour after I read it. Of course, as soon as one distraction is gone, others gradually sneak their way in; I’m still unproductive as hell XD