Your ability to sell your technology, not how brilliant it is, determines your success as a tech entrepreneur. To properly monetize, you’ll need entrepreneurial skills. The good news is that entrepreneurship is a talent that can be learned, and reducing your sleep debt can help you develop the skills and characteristics of a successful entrepreneur.
What Is Insufficient Sleep And How Does It Affect Tech Entrepreneurs?
According to sleep specialists, meeting your individual, genetically determined sleep need has the greatest impact on how we feel and operate. That’s because, while eight hours of sleep is regarded the gold standard for a good night’s sleep, not everyone needs that much sleep. While the average sleep duration is 8 hours and 10 minutes (plus or minus 44 minutes), one out of every seven persons needs nine hours or more.
Furthermore, if you don’t get the sleep your body needs, you’ll accumulate sleep debt, which is the difference between the number of hours you’ve gotten in the last 14 days and your sleep requirement. Sleep debt affects every aspect of how we feel and behave, and it’s the most reliable predictor of our daily energy and productivity levels, cognitive state, emotional and physical health.
Because sleep debt is calculated over a two-week period, how we’re feeling right now isn’t only the result of last night’s sleep; it’s also the result of the 13 nights before that. Essentially, meeting your sleep demands on a consistent basis is the key to feeling and performing at your best on any given day.
If you want to see a return on your investment, consistency, like the purposeful manner you practise exercise or nutrition, is vital.
The glue that holds all of the attributes of a successful IT entrepreneur together is sleep. Sleep debt, or the stress exerted on the brain as a result of insufficient sleep, causes cracks and holes in that foundation, making it impossible for the characteristics of a successful digital entrepreneur to emerge.
Reduce your sleep debt to under five hours, the threshold at which study shows you’re still operating near your best, and you’ll increase the precise abilities needed for successful tech entrepreneurship.
To Avoid Sleep Deprivation, Identify Your Sleep Requirements
The first step in determining how much sleep debt we have is to understand our sleep needs. If we don’t know how much sleep our bodies require, we’re more likely to underestimate our sleep needs and exaggerate how much time we’re actually asleep. The fact that we have a biological proclivity to subjectively adjust to sleep deprivation while our performance and well-being suffers adds to the perplexity.
Here are some ideas to help you figure out what kind of sleep you require:
- A Self-Check-In at Noon: Make it to noon without taking a nap or drinking a cup of coffee. If you get to lunchtime and feel like you can’t function without either, you’re probably sleep deprived.
- The Challenge of No Alarm Clock: Do not set your morning alarm for a week. Then figure out how long you sleep and when you go to bed and wake up naturally.
- Make Use of Technology: Calculating your sleep needs and tracking your sleep debt is simple with sleep technology in apps, wearables, and sleep monitoring technology built into your phone, such as Apple Health Kit and Google Fit.
Sleep Deprivation: How to Get Rid of It
While understanding our sleep demands is critical for avoiding significant sleep debt, it’s absurd to expect us to avoid any debt at all. Fortunately, sleep debt can be addressed, and excessive debt can be reversed.
Going to bed earlier, napping at the appropriate times, and rising up later but not more than an hour later than normal are three tactics for catching up on sleep without disrupting your circadian cycle natural body clock. Sleep efficiency is a fourth technique the time you spend asleep. Improvements in our sleep hygiene can help with this. Good sleep hygiene will also assist us in meeting our sleep requirements and avoiding oversleeping.
Here are some sleep hygiene tips that have been clinically validated:
- Create the Perfect Sleep Environment: Sleeping in a cool, dark, and quiet atmosphere is best. Set your thermostat to 65-68 degrees Fahrenheit, invest in blackout curtains and/or an eye mask, and drown out the noise with a white noise machine or earplugs.
- Create a Bedtime Wind-Down Routine: Your brain and body need to settle down before going to bed. In the one to two hours leading up to bedtime, disconnect from everyday pressures with yoga or meditation, a warm bath or shower, or relaxing music.
- Time Your Light Exposure: The most potent indication for the time of your circadian rhythm is light. As soon as you wake up, get some sunlight, and then turn off the lights, especially blue light, 90 minutes before bedtime.
- Keep to a Sleep Regimen: Create and stick to a sleep schedule. Circadian alignment is aided by a consistent bedtime and waking time, which leads to improved sleep quality, health, and productivity.
Sleep = Success
Sleep is an often ignored but critical component of entrepreneurial success in the tech industry. When it comes to entrepreneurship, peak executive functioning and stamina are essential, so it stands to reason that if you’re sleep deprived, you won’t be operating at your best, and you’ll really be lowering the bar. This is true in any profession, but it is especially true for digital entrepreneurs, who require a demanding combination of mental, emotional, and social acuity and agility, all of which are badly hurt by lack of sleep.
That’s why keeping track of and managing your sleep debt is one of the most basic, straightforward, and cost-effective ways to assure a positive return on investment for your IT organisation. Sleep analytics, fortunately, has never been more powerful or user-friendly. However, not all sleep tracking technology is created equal. Choosing a software solution that tracks sleep debt instead of sleep quality or phases gives you the best chance of quickly fulfilling your full potential as a tech entrepreneur.
