I agree that the time cost of shopping can eat at the calculation. Looking at Wirecutter and Amazon top reviews for ACs can help make a quicker decision for many such purchases.
lynettebye
Karma: 1,230
Good points—these heuristics are much better than nothing, but probably shouldn’t be taken at face value without some additional thought.
I interpreted it as overall average productivity drop, which makes sense since I wouldn’t expect most people to report productivity losses at the lower end of this scale (75°F). Rereading it, my interpretation still seems more likely, but it’s not totally clear which one the authors meant.
Good question—I don’t think we know as much about that as would be ideal.
In laboratory studies and among shift workers (people working during the night and sleeping during the day), there’s a bunch of studies that find negative effects if your sleeping/waking schedule is misaligned with your circadian rhythm (see the sleep timing section here https://www.sleephealthjournal.org/article/S2352-7218(14)00013-8/pdf). However, I don’t know of studies testing just sleep timing in real-world normal populations.
More broadly, sleep hygiene is helpful for insomnia, but much less so than CBT-I (e.g. this meta-analysis https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29194467). However, according to the doctors I spoke with, sleep hygiene is often used as a first-line treatment because people can easily test it at home, and they should get results within a month of consistent use if sleep hygiene will help. It sounds like most people who have insomnia have already taken care of basic sleep hygiene, though both of the sleep specialists I interviewed (Dr. Bertisch and Dr. Barger) emphasized consistent sleep schedules as one of the most important sleep hygiene tips people commonly miss.
However, that doesn’t address the specific details of what counts as consistent times. For people with insomnia, Stimulus Control Therapy indicates you shouldn’t go to bed until you feel sleepy but should wake up at the same time. So if that’s you, I expect setting a consistent alarm time regardless of when you went to bed might be good.
They don’t have RTCs of just sleep timing in everyday settings; that’s not the same as not having evidence. Sleep specialists have a theory of why sleep timing is important, RTCs of sleep hygiene that show a moderate effect on insomnia, and personal experience working with patients. It’s unfortunate that we don’t have research in finer grained detail, but there is evidence supporting the doctor’s recommendations.
Does that mean it will work for you? Not necessarily. Based on the overall performance of sleep hygiene, I would expect at most a modest improvement in sleep quality. It’s your call whether poor sleep negatively impacts your life enough that a modest improvement in expectation is worth leaving parties early for a month. It’s totally fair if the information value isn’t worth that cost to you.
The purpose of Stimulus Control Therapy is to avoid implicitly associating the bed with being awake. Just guessing, it seems reasonable that greylag is correct about sexual activity being a concession to practicality. I suspect that most people would resist any advice to switch their sex life to the living room.
That sounds like what I heard – one doctor told me that home sleep tests were useless but insurance companies try to push people to use them instead of in-lab sleep tests because home tests are way less expensive. From reading elsewhere, it sounds like a home test might work if one has severe sleep apnea.
Sleep apnea is when your airway is blocked so you’re not breathing during your sleep, which results in lower oxygen in your blood and repeatedly waking up to restart breathing. This fragments your sleep and leaves you feeling tired.
For a home test, I think the patient has to set up the equipment themselves, which I expect is more likely to result in bad data. Since doctors treat sleep apnea as a chronic condition, I would be surprised if sleeping in another bed caused it.
I’m curious if you’re willing to share the 30 decisions, or at least ones that aren’t too personal?
Sounds possible, though most people who snore don’t have sleep apnea.
I’d expect that too many people apply for most units for it to be worth that much effort to game. A quick search indicates that 40-500 people might apply for a unit. If it takes someone several years to successfully apply after they are eligible, that doubles the lost earnings. They also can’t resell the unit for several decades, so they are locked in for a long time. The option value of moving in the next 40 years seems significant. https://www.wbur.org/radioboston/2019/02/20/inclusionary-development-housing-affordable https://www.bostonglobe.com/lifestyle/style/2014/12/15/boston-housing-lottery-offers-luxury-low-cost/aAPOGUm4FwbvHExq27mDUM/story.html
This tip was intended for those things were you can really truly never do them. E.g. Since thinking more about this, I stopped folding my pjs, and found I’m just as happy this way as I was folding them perfectly Marie Kondo style.
Thanks for noting this. I suspect that many people suffering from fatigue-esque depression symptoms would benefit from Wellbutrin in particular, but I want to be very careful about recommending a particular drug given that I’m not a psychiatrist and I may be missing important caveats.
There’s a group for Effective Altruists on Focusmate:
(Dony Christie) “The Basic plan creates the group, and any member who has not subscribed to the Focusmate service for unlimited Focusmate sessions ($5/month) will be able to do 3 free sessions a week with either members of the EA group or the general public. Basic costs $50/month total, which rounds out to $2.50/month per person we currently have interested, and we will get even more people once the group exists and is popularized.
If you wish for unlimited sessions with other EAs (imagine a highly focused 9-5 virtual workweek with a gamut of likeminded people!), then you can upgrade to their plan at your leisure. This looks like the better option to me as the cost of crowdfunding it in order to provide unlimited for everyone seems strictly inferior to people individually getting it themselves, especially as probably not everyone will choose to do more than 3 sessions a week or even continue using the service.
To donate to help cover this, you may paypal.me or Venmo me @Dony-Christie. Suggested amounts of $2.50/person if you’re willing, $5.00/person if you’re enthusiastic; send whatever’s comfortable for you. If I receive more than the first month’s amount then I will put the extra money towards the next month (assuming we continue the subscription to future months; I’ll pay it back if not).
Here is the link to join. On the dashboard, under ‘My Groups’, check the box on the left to toggle between showing sessions for just our group and normal Focusmate. I personally booked a bunch of sessions for next week that I’d love for you to join me at; the times are 12pm, 1pm, 4pm, and 8pm Pacific time/UTC-7 each day this Sunday to Friday. You might not see my name show up because some of the sessions have me booked with normal Focusmate users, but if you book one of those aforementioned times it will switch the booking to me (or any member of the group who’s booked at that time). You can also book any other time and other EAs may probably join you by seeing and clicking on your session, or if that fails to happen then you will be booked with a normal Focusmate user unless a member of the group then books that time as well and switches the normal user out.
Let me know if you have any questions, especially if you’re new to Focusmate! I will check in with all of you to make sure everything’s working, and write a user’s guide with best practices. Let’s work on big things together!”
Yes, that link is the first reply.
I also shared the PayPal link out of fairness to Dony, who organizes the group.
I used a Lights sheet ( https://www.ultraworking.com/lights ) to track the variables alongside my daily habits, to reduce overhead.
If you dig deeper into the first link, you’ll find these numbers which indicate that the productivity loss increases as a function of the temperature increase: “In addition to the prevalence of productivity loss, seven studies reported precise changes in productivity as a function of environmental heat stress. These studies suggest an average 2.6% productivity decline (individual study estimates: 0.8%, 1.4%, 1.8%, 2.2%, 2.8%, 4.4%, 5.0%) for every degree increase beyond 24°C WBGT.”
Still, I’m all for running an experiment to check how much your personal productivity responds to temperature! Individual variance might be high here.