---
aliases: ["Sleeping More Is a Competitive Advantage"]
Is A: Evergreen
Topics: ["[[topic-sleep-recovery]]", "[[topic-mental-health]]"]
Status: Published
---
# Sleeping More Is a Competitive Advantage
The tech industry glorifies sleep deprivation. 'Sleep when you're dead.' '80-hour weeks.' These are cultural artifacts from an era when we didn't understand what sleep deprivation does to cognitive performance.

Sleep-deprived people are bad at judging their own impairment. They think they're functioning at 80% when they're actually at 50%. They make more errors, have worse judgment, and are less creative — and they don't know it.

Consistently sleeping 7-8 hours doesn't make you less productive. It makes you more productive per hour, with better judgment and lower error rates. The math nearly always works out.

The evidence on this is overwhelming and I find it remarkable how widely it is still ignored. Matthew Walker's research at Berkeley demonstrates that after 17-19 hours of wakefulness, cognitive performance degrades to the equivalent of a blood alcohol level of 0.05%. Most professionals would never attend a meeting drunk, but they routinely make important decisions on 5-6 hours of sleep, which produces comparable impairment. The self-assessment paradox — sleep-deprived people consistently overestimate their own functioning — means that the people most affected by this are the least likely to recognize it.

My own experience confirms the research. I track my sleep with an Oura ring and my writing output with simple metrics: words per hour, editing time per piece, and reader engagement on published pieces. The correlation between sleep quality and every single one of these metrics is strong enough that I no longer treat sleep as a personal preference. I treat it as a business input, like software or office space. When I sleep 7.5+ hours, my first-draft quality is noticeably higher, I require fewer editing passes, and the resulting pieces generate more reader engagement. When I sleep under 6.5 hours for more than two consecutive nights, my writing degrades in specific, predictable ways: I default to cliches, my arguments become less structured, and I miss logical gaps that I would normally catch.

The competitive advantage of sleep becomes even more pronounced in domains that require creativity and judgment rather than rote execution. A factory worker on 6 hours of sleep can still operate a machine at 90% efficiency. A founder on 6 hours of sleep makes hiring decisions, strategic bets, and product calls with dramatically impaired judgment — and the consequences of those impaired decisions compound over months and years. The worst part is that the high-stakes decisions where judgment matters most are often the ones made at the end of long, sleep-deprived days. The structure of founder life systematically concentrates the most important decisions in the periods of worst cognitive performance.

## Key insight
Sleep is the highest-leverage performance intervention available to knowledge workers, and it is free. Every hour of sleep between 6 and 8 hours produces more than an hour of effective work the following day through improved focus, creativity, and judgment. The math is unintuitive but consistent: sleeping 7.5 hours and working 9 focused hours produces more and better output than sleeping 6 hours and working 11 foggy hours. The founders and creators who internalize this do not see sleep as a constraint on their productivity. They see it as the foundation of their productivity.

## Related
- [[on-founder-energy-management]] — Sleep as the first tier of the energy management framework
- [[recovery-week-in-training]] — Sleep is to daily recovery what recovery weeks are to training periodization
- [[training-load-and-knowledge-work]] — The adaptation model requires sleep as the primary recovery mechanism
- [[cycling-teaches-patience]] — The discipline to sleep enough is the same discipline that prevents going out too hard on a ride
- [[topic-sleep-recovery]] — Broader thinking on sleep and recovery
