Wake up! You Don’t Need Your Beauty Sleep.

From the University of Western Australia’s “Science Matters” Vol 4. no 2. October 2009.

“I find that if you don’t sleep, you get an awful lot done”, says Robyn Williams, ABC science broadcaster, with a smile.

I know that to be true.

I often am awake by 3 a.m. with an idea pulsing through my head.

Wide awake.

No hope of sleep.

I rise and start writing, developing, or whatever it is.

Sometimes I go back to bed at 5:00; sometimes I just carry on and watch the dawn.

It is not the life of the 9-to-5er, with a bus ride at each end.

But I can do a lot of creative or maintenance work that requires no personal communication in those few hours, freeing up my day for the phone calls and meetings.

And on a day like yesterday, when a one-hour coffee meeting with a fellow consultant stretches into a fun-filled spiral-out-of-control three-hour two-coffee two-cake marathon, I can relax, knowing that I have earlier earned the hours to spend in real conversation.

I arrived back in my home office at 4 p.m. and spent thirty minutes on the phone chatting with another consultant about a potentially lucrative money-making scheme.

Again, I felt no constraint to chivvy the conversation along; I’ve earned the right to spend time that I have earned.