For about 2.5 years I worked at an amusement park (park operations supervisor) and a Pizza place. The park was full time but did tend to thin out during the winter months, The pizza place was generally steady 15-20 /week. The manager at the pizza place was pretty cool about flexing with my schedule at the amusement park and I happily filled holes where they did not conflict with the park.
I quit the pizza place when we changed managers and new manager was less flexible.
When I first got hired by Scholastic book fairs I was working days there and nights at the park… M-F 7-3 @ scholastic then Wed-Sunday 530pm-1am.
That was brutal, but I had a baby on the way and figured I was going to need to support the g/f for a while.
kept that up for about 18 months.
about a year later I was asked to come back to the park to work security. That was just weekends Fri-Sat-Sun 7pm-1am.
The one thing I noticed most was…money can pile up when you have no time to spend it. I as a <$10/hr employee with multiple jobs was sitting on zero debt and $4K in the bank at one point.
In general, it takes an average of about 90 to get through one full REM cycle. If you don’t make it to the REM stage, you’re not getting “deep” sleep. The body does all kinds of healing and restorative functions that it doesn’t do during the alpha- and beta-wave parts of the sleep cycle. None of those naps are going to help you. It doesn’t look like you’re going to get but maybe 1-2 full REM cycles in a 24-hour period.
Me, I need at least 8-9 hours a night. Nine is better, if I can get it. I can’t function on less than six hours, which means (to me), that I require 4-6 REM cycles in a given 24-hour period to be coherent, able to concentrate, drive safely, operate heavy machinery, and all that. Many people can get by on 3-4 REM cycles in a 24-hour period. Maybe you’re one of those, I don’t know.
I think this will be a very dangerous experiment. My suggestion would be to dig a little deeper on your current budget and try to go for one full-time and one part-time job. Two full-times… probably not worth the money, if you can sustain it for more than a couple of pay periods.
As I see it, the schedule you’ve posted for managing your sleep leaves no time for anything unexpected - and there is always something unexpected. If you proceed with this, you might be better off packing dinner with your lunch and eating dinner at your day job and sleeping there for a few hours before commuting to the second job. Then, ask about not taking a lunch break at the second job and leave at 5am instead of 6am. Better to have 2 hours of sleep at once than to take a lunch break. You should also get up at 7:30 am so you have time to fully wake up and eat breakfast with your family.
This is my suggestion.
If you take out a loan you would have to work for 12 - 24 months to pay it off but, depending on your pay and number of hours, you could also save money to build a financial cushion.
Do you have any flexibility with your day job schedule? For instance, if you could arrange your schedule to work your day job 10 hours/day Monday - Thursday, then you could work 8 to10 hour shifts Friday, Saturday & Sunday at a second job. You’d be working everyday, but you’d still have time each day to interact with your family and get a full night’s sleep.
Or if you have a lot of vacation time saved up at your day job, see if you can talk to your boss about using some of those hours to take a day off each week and use that day to work a second job.
This will kill someone else. Seriously, if you’re going to try this experiment, get someone else to drive you, or, at the very least, make sure that there is someone you trust to take the keys from you if you’re not fit to be behind the wheel.
Your schedule looks good on paper, in the same way a megalomaniac’s plan for world domination does.
If the whole purpose of this brief for grief is to “..last only until (you) find a better day-job”, then where does finding a new job fit in? And quite honestly, how well will you perform in an interview, let alone the demands of a new job?
It appears the only reason you’re willing to take quantifiable risks to your health is that you feel there’s no machismo in getting a loan.
I think it would be useful to seriously reconsider your options. What you present as workable comes across as a quite adolescent view really; do you truly believe what you propose is sustainable? If nothing else, that 15-minute drive home after even a couple of weeks of shattered sleep really has neon lights and screaming alarm bells all over it.
Not to catastrophise here, but a dead hero is still dead.
I only just noticed the driving. You won’t be fit to drive on so little sleep and no deep sleep at all - I mean, really, you’ll be dangerous behind the wheel.
Your likelihood of an accident is pretty high, and, if it’s discovered that you were intentionally depriving yourself of sleep and then driving (and that would be really easy to discover - anyone who looked would see that you were driving to work and that said work is not the one you listed as your occupation), your insurance wouldn’t be valid and you might face criminal charges - it would definitely count as dangerous drivingand, if you killed someone, the charge could be death by dangerous driving, punishable by up to 14 years in prison.
Sorry for the scaremongering, but planning to drive on so little sleep is really unsafe.
I agree with this. You would do better to work 7 days a week than to try that 5-day schedule. Honestly, it’s insane, and you won’t be coherent by the end of the first 5 days. Working 7 days, 10 hours each really would be more sustainable, and doable for 6 months or even a year if needed.
Look, I’m one of the people who need very little sleep, and I know damn well that even I start slipping pretty quickly if I get less than 4 unbroken hours a night. You’re proposing to get by on less than half that. The naps may ease the symptoms a bit, but they won’t make up for it. You will be significantly impaired pretty much all the time, and subject to dozing off any time you’re sitting still–which will be most of the day, I gather. You’ll also put yourself and others in danger any time you get behind the wheel.
With all of that said, if you’re hell-bent on doing this to yourself, all I can advise is to concentrate on breathing. Your body will be trying to make you shut down all the time, but you can get temporary boosts by upping your oxygen intake. Breathe as deeply as you can, especially while driving or operating any other machinery. It only helps in short bursts, though.
Agree pretty strongly with much of what was said so far. If you want to mess with your own life, that is, of course, your right, but PLEASE don’t put others at risk. Is there any way you can carpool or take some other public transportation so you don’t have to drive?
Are there any other extra jobs you could do? Weekend retail work over Christmas, early morning post office deliveries, that sort of thing? I guess you’ve looked at them already, but JIC.
Putting aside the issue of whether you SHOULD be doing this…
…if you need to do this, do some research on polyphasic sleep. This is one guy’s experience Polyphasic Sleep – One Year Later – Steve Pavlina You might find some good tips on how to get through it.
Stay away from any quick-energy carbs. You’re not going to want a sugar crash at the wrong time. I think your eating would need to be very clean; good fats, good proteins, and slow burning carbs.
FWIW, when my kids were babies, and very poor sleepers, I managed ok on frequent naps and small stretches of sleep.
It might help to find some ways/tricks that help you drift off to sleep. It’s not going to work to sit there on the train or at lunch time and get frustrated because you are wide awake. NO frustration. maybe there is a book that will put you to sleep at the first page, or some sort of mindless activity that can become the trigger for “nap now”. Worst comes to worst, just remind yourself that a rest is as much of a break as sleeping (whether it’s true or not).
I did FT 9-5 and PT 6-10 several years ago. No social life at all, and I didn’t feel like doing much on weekends. Biggest problem I had was that the wife coulnd’t make the kids behave. So when I got home all tired, the wife would be sleeping and the kids woud be up late doing what they wanted. If you have a wife who can put her foot down and not be a pushover, you might get through it. For me, it wasn’t worth the hassle.
Could you figure out a work schedule that included shorter shifts Mon-Fri and then do extra work hours on the weekend? You might work 7 days/week, but at least your work hours would be more spread out.
Alternatively, could you do a second job like delivering papers? I deliver papers for a couple hours every morning, go home for an hour or so to get the kids off to school and grab a power nap, then work 8-5. Usually I pick up a few (very few, in my case) hours on the weekend.
I’m only working a total of 50-some hours/week, and it can get really, really exhausting.
Good luck, and I hope you are able to take care of yourself.
I have worked at night for over 16 years so I do understand sleep debt. I’ve taken classes during the day so I have some understanding of what you are planning to do. However looking at your schedule you will be driving and that is going to be dangerous. By day 3 you will effectively be a zombie, don’t expect your decision making power to be good. Your reaction time will also have diminished. I was getting 3 straight hours of sleep and 1 hr of nap and I almost had 4 car accidents before I knew I could not drive safely. This was the by the third week, and I really had my weekends free - not like you are going to because you have kids who will expect parent time.
Is there any way you can stay at one of the jobs and sleep there? I know you will be missing family time but if you are in a car accident you will be missing job time and possibly be without your car. Or can you get someone else to drive you for at least the last 3 days of the week?
I’m a full-time student and currently hold three part-time jobs on-campus; I’m inching towards 40 hours a week most of the time. I have a limited social life, but, admittedly, I’m not the type that needs people 24/7.
I also spent a summer working as a waitress and a cashier and clocking over sixty hours between the two.
The waitressing and the cashiering were much more brutal (aka, on my feet virtually always, always in a hurry) and involved driving to them, unlike my current situation where I simply walk everywhere. Please be careful driving, if you must.
Small bits of exercise and eating well are definitely your friend, but IMHO sleep is your best friend.
+1 . When doing the Atkins Diet, once I entered ketosis, I had a screaming amount of energy. Needed less sleep, slept well, needed little to no caffeine and just was filled with focused energy.
As a young lad, I often worked a full-time job plus a part-time job. I was young and needed little sleep.
Most brutal though was one semester after I started university. I was a part-time student at first and worked the graveyard shift on my job. Once a week I had a three-hour class at night, then my graveyard shift, then a class of an hour or two in the late morning. I was exhausted come the afternoon of the second day.
My second job was a paper route. I did it for almost a year. It was every single night, and it took about 3 hours. I worked an evening shift, 2-10 or 11, then I went home and napped / watched TV until 2am or 3 at the latest, then I did my paper route. I was usually home by 6, and I could sleep the next 6-7 hours before walking up and doing it all again.
It worked well for me because I still got a long stretch of sleep before my normal job, and I had a few hours between jobs to do whatever I wanted. Also, I could start my route anytime I wanted, as long as I had every paper delivered by 6 am (though if I showed up too early, I would have to wait to get my papers).
At one time, I was running from house to house, and optimizing my stops to get the route to 2:15. But if I was tired and lazy, and drove from stop to stop, My time was 3 and a half hours. Sundays, and other “double paper days” usually added an extra 30 minutes
I hope the OP consideres finding a different part time job. the schedule he posted is not going to work for all the reasons mentioned.
