Sleep and Frustration

“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” -Thomas A. Eddison

It’s been a crazy last couple of days…

Let me first say that sleeping/waking schedules have never been my forte. I hated getting up as a kid (definitely not unique in this) and I hated being roused from any sleep whatsoever. Just prefacing this post with the fact that I am a terrible waker-upper. It’s a physical and metal battle for me to rouse myself from slumber.

That being said the last few days have been absolutely horrendous for the Everyman sleep schedule.

I was doing well. Actually fantastically. On Wednesday I nailed all of my naps, my core sleep went well, and I felt that I had finally gotten to the point where my body had acclimated to the new sleeping schedule I wanted. But alas it wasn’t to last. Later in the morning(?) at about 2 am on Thursday I fell asleep and just was in a coma until about 10 am. “CRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAP” That was about the gist of what I said upon waking.

It was really frustrating and a bit disheartening. I had really hopped that I had made the change and gotten myself onto the Everyman sleep schedule and that I was well on my way towards the Uberman. I tried to recover and take my schedule naps for Thursday but it didn’t work out either. With all the sleep that my body stole from my schedule I couldn’t go to sleep during the day at all. All my naps were just a frustrating 20 minutes of trying to will myself to sleep. Around 3:30 this morning I did manage to make myself fall asleep almost on time with my Everyman schedule and I have successfully woken at 7 as planned. But instead of hoping this was a one off occurrence I did notice that I was slowly making my way towards this tragic event.

In order to figure out what was wrong with the problem I am going to apply something that I learned playing Starcraft. Yes, a real world application from a faux world reality. So I guess I need to preface this as well.

There is a Starcraft 2 caster named Day[9] (real name Sean Plott) who does amazing things for the e-sports community and for Starcraft 2 in general. He has a show that he puts out almost daily called well… Day[9]tv and he does Dailys. He takes replays from the Starcraft 2 community and he analyzes them and explains to his wide viewer ship strategies for improving in the game of Starcraft 2. He does this with a good, well though out method and explains in a way that is relevant to his viewers. He makes things easy to understand and easy to remember.

In one of his most recent dailys (http://blip.tv/day9tv/day-9-daily-309-the-right-and-wrong-way-to-learn-5229698) he went over a system on how to efficiently locate a problem in your game play and how to go about fixing it. It’s quite simple really.

• First: Identify your problem
• Second: What caused that problem
• Third: How do you fix that problem

Like I said: simple. So lets put this to use on my sleeping schedule

• First: Identify your problem — Falling asleep and oversleeping
• Second: What caused this problem — Not occupying my time as well as I should; I need to make sure that my waking hours are productive and filled with activities that keep both my mind and body in motion.
• Third: how do you fix this problem — Well, I need to do more things with myself. Watching Top Gear and other tv shows on Netflix just isn’t cutting the mustard.

So obviously I need to do more with myself than just passively watch things on the couch. Duh. This isn’t a hard to understand concept. In fact, I think that even minus the new sleep schedule this would be beneficial to me anyway. So I am going to compile a list of things that I want and need to do and plan on getting every item on it completed. There are two types of activities however that I need to keep in mind. There are one time activities (such a placing a phone call, or sending an email, etc etc) and there are recurring activities (like playing SC2, working on a new program, this blog, or working out). I need to make a balanced list of things to do each day that I can work on that allow me some variation so as not to work myself into a mindless state and to keep my body moving as well. This is an active choice and I must stay active in order to be successful in this endeavor.

So what am I going to do? Well I figure I should make a list of things I have always wanted to do but used the absolutely empty excuse of “I don’t have enough time to” to not do.

• Write a fantasy novel
• Create an app for the iPad/iPhone that helps live playing musicians
• Practice more guitar
• Practice more SC2 (That was the original intent of this whole shebang)
• Learn new languages (Spanish, French, and Arabic)
• Write more music
• Workout and get back into good health
• Become a proficient cook
• Learn to create and fix/maintain electronic gear (particularly guitar equipment)
• Get involved with an ultimate Frisbee team
• Record an album
• Perform live on a semi-regular basis

As you can see, these things aren’t things that improve or are completed in a day, or two, or heck even a few months on some of them. And this is something I must keep in mind. I’ve a bad habit of looking to the end goal of something and then turning around and seeing how much I have to do in order to get there and being overwhelmed and not completing whatever it was because of this. But not this time. I’m starting at the start line and working my way to the finish.

The second set of things to do are things that I should be doing everyday and that I need to do in order to keep myself awake and mentally aware.

• Do something physically challenging everyday (minus Sunday) — This fits into the long term goal of getting in shape, but it’s a daily occurence or at least needs to be. This is the way I need to think. “I need to workout today, just because it’s today.” not “I need to workout today because I HAVE TO LOSE WEIGHT AND LOOK LIKE AN A&F MODEL AAAAAAAAAHHHH GO GOGOGOGGOGOGOGGOGO!” I need to focus on the today/short term.
• Do some sort of mental exercise as well (outside of SC2). I’ll work on doing memory games and mental alacrity tests
• Chores
• Keeping up with people that are important to me
• Maintaining my electronic equipment
• Read something — journal, NPR article, news, a chapter or two in a new book. Just something.

These two lists intersect one another. The things I want to accomplish long term have to make it onto my to-do everyday list. I just need to remember that things don’t happen overnight and that it will take time and effort to complete and check things off of my long term goal list. But if I put those things onto a short list then I will feel more accomplished than if I just look at that long term list.

Right! I’ve got my lists! But how do I now work them into my schedule? Well, I guess that means planning out my days. This is also a difficult thing for me to do. I am great at making lists, and making schedules. But I’m not so keen on keeping them. But with some effort and a my smart phone reminding me what I need to be doing, I am going to attempt to make this all come together and work out. I will not bore you all with the minute by minute planning of my day.

 

Lets hope that this approach will keep me from not following my sleep schedule and will help me to be able to accomplish more with the time that I am trying to give myself.

MLG Fun

I spent all of the day (minus the naps) watching the MLG tournament. So many good games, good quality, and even after a storm and a flood they still managed to get the stream back up and running. Good for them.

This video is just fun. Another reason I’d love to break into the top tier and be able to chill with these dudes. Because if you can’t have a relay race with people you play games with, who can you?

 

Uberman update and SC2 update

It’s currently day 5 of the Everyman to Uberman experiment and it has gotten better! I haven’t missed as many naps and sleeping is becoming easier. At first it was very difficult to even sleep at all during my 20 min “naps”. I would just sit there thinking about things like I usually do when going to bed and then 20 mins later my alarm would ring and I would grudgingly have to get up. But today I successfully fell asleep in all of my naps. I only missed one today to go check out the U2 concert that was going on and I figured that it was worth missing 20 mins of sleep for.

My thoughts and observations thus far:

• Sleeping (napping) has gotten easier after the third day. I am able to sleep so that I don’t fall asleep as hard during my core nap time.
• I have noticed some bags under my eyes but I don’t feel tired and I don’t feel un-energized. In fact I really am starting to feel good throughout the day and I feel the urge to be even more active than before.
• A downside to this is that it has been sort of tricky to nail down what time of day it is. I may need to invest in a wrist watch or something because when I wake from my naps my internal clock is being reset over and over and I feel like I am “Groundhogs Day”-ing it around 10 am all day long. That is until the sun goes down.

So it has been good and I am quite excited so far! I have gotten some great tweets and messages from people who have read about or have done the uberman and they have all been very helpful and encouraging! If you have sent me a message I just wanted to say thanks a lot! I appreciate it.

As for Starcraft II: I have hit a small wall. I am getting better, but it’s a slow process and I feel that I need to pull back and to work on some game mechanics and core strategies.

I have started playing Random in all of my match ups. That includes 1v1, 2v2, 3v3, and 4v4s. I know there are a lot of reasons to NOT roll random, but I enjoy the challenge and I like the diversity of being able to play all three races. This is going to present a problem because I want to be quite adept with all three, but that requires an equal amount of time for all three. So lets say it takes me 6 months to get to “Masters” league using Terran, by all logic it would take me as long for Protoss, and just as long for Zerg. I need to find a way to make this process more streamlined and effective.

I have been having some problems with knowing all the hotkeys for all the units for all the races. But thanks to the “Starcraft II Hotkey Trainer” map made by VindicatorDotCom, I have learned Terran quite well and quite quickly. I am going to try to incorporate a 30 minute hotkey training session in with my playing every day. It can be found here or on B.net with a simple search: http://www.sc2mapster.com/maps/starcraft-ii-hotkey-trainer/

Second thing I have noticed that I am struggling with is managing micro/macro at the same time. I have a high APM (Avg 130) but it’s no good if it’s all just spamming. Which I’ll admit some of it is. It’s difficult not to click a bagillion times when you REALLY want your units to move faster. For some dumb reason my brain just thinks “CLICK THE *#&@ OUT OF THAT UNIT!!! GOGOGOGOGGO!!” But that doesn’t help. So what I plan on doing is trying to slow down my games (by go to Normal or Fast) and making all of my actions very precise and with purpose. I will play an hour or so working on getting my APM and my “Useful APM” to match up. Some things that I can improve upon off of the top of my head include:

1. Not spam clicking while commanding a unit. If I have a safe line of travel, I will try to click once and then move on to another action that will be useful. (One caveat will be when I am micro-ing to try to get maximum army effectiveness and whatnot. That can’t really be done with slow single clicks. At least, I don’t think so. If you think so, leave me a comment explaining why and how.)
2. Improving my keyboard hand accuracy with Hotkey Trainer, and trying to also make it less “spammy”.
3. I don’t want my APM to drop below 100, but I will be ok with it dropping down to 30 as long as every single 30 of those APM’s are useful and with a definite purpose.

Third and I think the most important is my decision making. I used to think I had good decisive alacrity when playing this game thanks to hours and hours of watching Day[9] and other replays. I thought I knew all the builds (pffft) and how to counter them and I was totally confident that I could pull any of them off with ease! Ha! But lo and behold as I ladder more and more (with friends and by myself) I find that I am dying more and more to things I thought I knew the answer to. Thanks to a frustrating 50% win rate I have come to the hard learned conclusion that I still have A LOT to learn. Duh.

So my plan is to start doing what Day[9] has suggested in these dailys of his. (Check him out at http://blip.tv/day9tv and at http://justin.tv/day9tv) I plan on playing a few games in the exact same manner, looking at where I forget to do this or that, where I could remove something, and how I can just streamline my builds. Rather than thinking “What can I add to fix this” I am going to go the other way and ask what I can remove to make my builds more effective. Granted they are all quite simple right now, and until I get my useful APM up to where my spam APM is I probably won’t be able to do fancy things like a 3 pronged drop attack whilst moving into the main ramp with the large army.

If you guys have any suggestions (that are constructive) go ahead and toss them my way!

Transition Phases and Planning a new Build

Hey there everyone!

It’s day 3 here, and let me tell you that it’s been rough. Trying to keep my body awake when it is normally programmed to sleep is a difficult thing to do indeed. And seeing as how I can’t go straight to the Uberman sleep schedule cold turkey (I fell asleep after about 28 hours and slept then for about 10…) I have decided that doing the Everyman schedule first to transition is the wiser way to go about this. I am breaking this up into a 3 part process adjusting sleeping times as the next two weeks progress.

For this first week (I am currently on day 2 of the Everyman schedule) I plan on sleeping for a “Core” nap time of 3 hours from 3 a.m. to 7 a.m. This allows me to still get a large chunk of sleep time which my body is used to and can recognize. I will then take 20-30 minute naps at 10:40 a.m., 2:40 p.m., 6:40 p.m., and one last one at 10:40 p.m. This will get me up to a grand total of 5 hours and 20 minutes of sleep. Here I made a pie chart to show you how this looks. Because visual stimuli are good! Also, pie is good.

Mmmm pie.

After a week of this I am going to transition to my Everyman 2. I will decrease my “Core” nap time down to 2 hours and leave my little nap times the same allowing my body to adjust to the 2 hour nap time drop. Look, more pie!

After this second week, I will then move into the straight Uberman schedule where I will just add a nap at 2:40 a.m. and another at 6:40 a.m. lowering my sleeping time down to 2 hours and increasing my time awake to 22 hours. Huzzah!

Let it begin!

Hello there!

For some reason or another you have been brought here, to my blog-thing, and noticed that it is about a few things. First, it’s about Starcraft 2. It’s my goal to become a professional level player and I am starting at the bottom! Second, is that I am going about achieving this in a unique way: by going on the Uberman polyphasic sleep schedule.

You might be asking yourself right now, “What the *#&@ is a polyphasic sleep schedule, and why does it even matter for SC2?” Well, I’m glad you asked:

By adjusting to and becoming an Uberman, I will have a grand total of 22 waking hours.

Yes you read that right. 22 hours. I plan on keeping a running blog about important things that happen, and I’ll be updating my twitter as well regularly with how I feel, what I am doing in regards to the schedule or SC2, and also I will be streaming as soon as I can get that set up and running smoothly.

Feel free to leave any comments or questions, add me on twitter, follow me here and there and wherever. Let’s see what the heck happens when one decides to spend 22 hours awake, and as much time as he can working on SC2.