Scribbles

One of my favorite sayings is “Sleep is for the dead.”  Why bother with sleep when I’ll be doing tons of it when they put me in the ground.  Before coming to INSEAD, I kept hearing from alumni and students on the lack of sleep as a result from all the partying and school work.  The threat of sleep deprivation didn’t really faze me, but I was curious about the numbers.

So I decided to put what I learned in class to good use and keep some statistics.  I figured that later on I can analyze the data and run comparisons between periods.  My guess is that P1 and P2 will be the worst.  But who knows, maybe in P5 all the partying will result in less sleep.  For now, just let me share what I’ve collected to this point.  The table below is my sleep durations for the first three weeks of class.  I don’t typically nap, but sometimes I’m forced to take power naps on those days where I only got 4 hours the night before.  As you can see, I do make up for a lot of sleep over the weekends.

During the week, I’m averaging almost 6, which isn’t too bad.  In actuality, what happens is I would pull 3 or 4 straight nights getting just a tad over 4 hours, and the one day where we don’t have early class, I would catch up and sleep in.  It’s during that stretch of the week when I have early classes that I feel the worst.  Another thing is the fact that we cram in so many activities into a single day that the days go by fast but feel really long.  As a result, sleep always feels short.  When I look at the numbers, I’m pretty surprised that it is that much.  All in all, I’m not complaining too loudly.  Mentally I’m fine with it, but sometimes my body just tells me more caffeine isn’t gonna cut it.

“What a totally dorky thing to do!” you say?  Well, I just wanted to give future INSEADers some hard numbers on top of the popular “you’re never going to sleep.”  Don’t say you weren’t warned…