Personal Development for Smart People^TM

If there’s a hump, I’m probably past it. The past 24 hours of polyphasic sleep have been my best so far. Last night was the first night where I felt fairly alert and awake without too much drowsiness. I still grabbed an extra 20-minute nap at 3am (between my scheduled 1am and 5am naps), but […]

It seems the polyphasic sleep adaptation is beginning to take root. I’m finally beginning to have dreams during my naps, which indicates REM sleep. In fact, sometimes the dreams seem to begin even before I feel I’ve fallen asleep. It’s not quite the same as lucid dreaming. It feels more like […]

So far, so good. I’ve continued getting all my scheduled naps on time without oversleeping. This day was much harder than the previous one though.
My best cycle of all was the 5-9pm one yesterday. I was in a state of relaxed consciousness, but with virtually no mental chatter. Perhaps my brain […]

I’ve completed my first day on the polyphasic sleep schedule, napping for 20-30 minutes every four hours. It’s been almost 36 hours since I last awoke from a full night’s sleep. “Day” is a relative term on this schedule, since the daytime sleeping schedule is no different than the nighttime one. I’m not sure whether […]

StevePavlina.com Personal Development for Smart People podcast #5
This podcast is about understanding beliefs and how to modify your beliefs in order to make goal achievement easier.
Enjoy the podcast…
Pavlina-005-Beliefs.mp3
(Time = 17:03, Size = 7.8MB)
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A couple days ago, I saw a post about polyphasic sleep on LifeHack.org. Since then I’ve been emailed about this topic as well, probably because I’ve written previously about becoming an early riser.
Polyphasic sleep involves taking multiple short sleep periods throughout the day instead of getting all your sleep in one long chunk. A popular […]

In this post we’re going to take a deep look into the concept of productivity.
Here’s my personal definition of productivity:
Productivity = Value / Time
(productivity equals value divided by time)
By this definition there are two primary ways of increasing productivity:
1) Increase the value created
2) Decrease the time required to create that value
You can complicate this definition […]

With respect to the intention-manifestation model of goal achievement mentioned in the previous post, like many others who’ve tried it, I have some difficulty applying it. When I’m at my most conscious, I’m able to focus my intentions congruently, and my goals begin to manifest with relative ease. However, sometimes I sink […]

One of the key models for goal achievement is that of cause and effect. This model says that your goal is an effect to be achieved, and your task is to identify and then create the cause that will produce the desired effect, thereby achieving your goal.
Sounds simple enough, right?
However, the main problem with this […]

Here’s some additional info to clarify why I chose to turn off blog comments:
For me the decision to turn off comments wasn’t so much about the spam. Spam was only a minor factor because decent filters can take care of blog spam well enough.
The main issue was the opportunity cost — the amount of […]