I remember doing this, too. I would often nap 2-3 times a day in crunch time and sleep less during the night, solving many problems.
I think the problem as you say is the performative part of work, and napping really doesn't look good in that sense.
Since COVID WFH I often also nap instead of eating lunch, which is a double power boost, since a big lunch can make you almost comatose.
1.) Sitting in a park sketching solutions on a notebook.
2.) Laying at the beach on vacation.
3.) Playing Legos with my daughter.
Without these ideas, I doubt there would've even been a PhD.
(There was a period of 2 years in my life where I did not have any significant ideas, at all. During that time, I was employed at a company which offered a constant stream of urgent TODO emails and tickets. I worked until exhaustion for 2 years, but did not get any work done.)
Govts get caught up in the latest emergency in the social/media and completely forget about innovation and long term planning. It's particularly acute in the UK at the moment.
I’m working at a place like that now and it’s been an eye roller. After ten years on the project one of the problem people has finally seen this as a problem (though I haven’t heard him admit that he contributes). He’s looking at code now written by two people who have been copying his code style for years, and suddenly feeling the pain of it. It’s great he’s growing, but he’s over forty and should have learned this years ago. I blame a mix of things including staying at one place for far too long.
And I keep telling him this code used to be worse, but I’ve been chipping away at it for some time.
Sometimes I want to put my hands up in defeat and leave but there is also a satisfaction and growth from simplifying the Rube Goldberg machine.
It still sucks though.
I should clarify that I didn't mean concurrent or consecutive here, but across several different projects. Different preconditions can sink a strategy. It's hard to get any signal when you apply multiple unsuccessful strategies to the same 'experiment'.
The 'big idea' came when I was on campus, standing outside smoking. Hit me like a bombshell. I literally ran to see my supervisor, blurted out IT'S JUST A F**G MOLECULE, cleared off his whiteboard and spent the next hour sketching out what turned out to be another 5 years of work.
Those eureka moments are where true creativity turns up, I find it impossible to solve problems through dedicated, stare-at-the-screen thought, but I'll get a brainwave at e.g. the gym and nearly drop the weights on my head.
Companies need to promote creative problem-solving spaces, and I'm not talking about a beanbag area with free lattes, but a sit-and-think, light, non-social way of working that promotes this kind of thing. No idea how this could be done in practice, though.
Unfortunately, there are people that do not understand how this concept works. These are the same employees that stare at screens trying to for a square peg into a round hole, but then see other employees trying it the other way and complain about how so many people are doing nothing when so much is to be done.
These complaints tend to percolate up, and these creative problem solving spaces end up getting removed to be replaced by more work space for the additional head count to solve all of the work to be done
Would that really solve the problem? I feel like when you're standing in front of your computer screen searching for a solution, it's because you're switching to some different and unplanned activity that you are able to get an eureka! moment. Creating a specific place where employees can go to think would defeat the whole purpose IMHO, because then people would go there and would do the exact same thing as when they're in front of their computer screen.
What may work is promoting short breaks during which employees can do any activity of their liking, whether it be playing video games, walking, smoking a cigarette... Basically anything that takes their mind off work. That guarantees development in creativity.
David Lynch analogizes his sitting-with-cigarettes-and-a-notepad-to-catch-ideas to fishing. You can't chase after them but once in a while a big one will come along.
“Nature has not intended mankind to work from eight in the morning until midnight without that refreshment of blessed oblivion which, even if it only lasts twenty minutes, is sufficient to renew all the vital forces… Don’t think you will be doing less work because you sleep during the day. That’s a foolish notion held by people who have no imaginations. You will be able to accomplish more. You get two days in one — well, at least one and a half,”
-- The Gathering Storm
Everybody else chugs coffee and is expected to work 9-18 without pause, like the rest of the Western world.
> Individually, an American coffee drinker consumes about three cups of coffee per day.
> Italians drink an average of 3 coffees a day
It seems that the averages are roughly equal. Of course there are outliers everywhere.
If you happen to see someone having a cappuccino at lunch, or, yikes! with their dinner, they're probably a tourist.
When I last lived there, Starbucks and the lattes and pumpkin spice big mugs were a "weird American novelty" for teens in major city centres.
A lot of people who are working in precarious situations actually work two or more jobs at less than 30 hours each, because 30 is when you qualify for employer provided health insurance.
Churchill: "Nancy, if I were your husband, I'd drink it.”
Somehow that doesn't make me feel much better
I get it that it works but wonder what could be the logical explanation of this. I remember this method was also mentioned in the movie Turner & Hooch.
I think another commonality is physical activity: walking, playing, washing. There may be some chemical thing going on with muscle activity but also subjectively I have a suspicion that these sorts of activities are essentially pumping noise into your cognitive processes, helping divergent thinking, while also keeping your attention sufficiently occupied to achieve the “non-vigilant” posture toward those ideas.
When you dream the constraint on your consciousness (simulation) are lifted to allow more divergent scenario. That’s why dreams can be a bit crazy.
It’s a bit like brainstorming on steroid, letting loose of more constraints.
Many of the hard problems in my career have been solved while having a long warm shower in the middle of the work day.
In general, the ace in my sleeve was understanding and leveraging the Eureka effect. Your subconscious is still working on the problem when your conscious mind is doing something else. Often, if pointed focus doesn't work, just leave it in the back burner to stew. Then wait for the proverbial light bulb to show you the way, out of nowhere. It never fails, but I have never heard anyone mention this phenomenon.
So it worked then, it works now. A 20 to 30 minute nap during the work day has a ton of benefits, including stress reduction. I don't know why it is frowned upon. I have fallen asleep many times at my desk and have been made fun of, but who gives a damn. I would rather be stress free and have some good ideas come about.
If anyone is interested, the yoga tradition has extensively developed this technique – it’s called Yoga Nidra.
The latter is associated with aging and physical decline.
(And most of my favorite papers came about from ideas that I'd had while on vacation.)
John Cleese on creativity
So, recent R&D into sleep tech has come along ways in the past 20 years. Basically research has shown that during nap/sleep cycles our brain moves around memories (from short-term to long-term and prioitization) and connections between memories. Also, this process optimizes information in the brain to make the access faster and more efficient thus providing opportunity for neuralogical advanced thought sessions given the datasets after a nap/sleep session.
Some basic take aways include +20% memory capacity per 8-hour sleep cycle and longer un-interrupted access to memory collections. It's also been shown that it's possible to tag the day's memories and then prioritize them during the next nap/sleep session. Significant results have shown that groups that take 30-minutes nap have stronger memory capacity versus groups with no naps.
The face of the R&D seems to be Matt Walker - PhD Brit with intense accent - you've been warned!
TL:DR - The brains basically recharges AND rewires during nap/sleep sessions.
Here's the links:
podcast: The Matt Walker Podcast
book: https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams/dp/1501...
Performative work is a disaster. I worked in a stuffy IT office of a company before I got my degree and became a software engineer. It took YEARS to deprogram performative work. I still hide when I take a nap. I suspect that if my current company found out I was sleeping on the job they'd still be upset with me. However, my output is so good the results speak for themselves. It would be difficult to fire me for napping.