Oct 12, 2021 7 min read Supersystems

Tracking and Optimizing for Sleep

Sleep is how humans charge their batteries. It is also the most important factor of productivity that often gets overlooked.

We try out all sorts of productivity tricks and tricks, but we forget our own sleep. If our batteries aren't fully charged, we can't function at our optimal selves.

Charlie Grinnell, co-founder of RightMetric realized this, and has since started to actively track his sleep and then make his schedule according to his sleep quality. Yes, you heard that right. Moving work around to optimize for sleep, not moving sleep around to accommodate work. Truly giving sleep the priority and importance it deserves. Let's hear it from him.

"A lot of people are always trying out different fitness routines, different productivity hacks and all sorts of things. But one thing that gets ignored the most is sleep. We spend 1/3 of our lives sleeping but I don't see enough people trying to optimize their sleep quality.

I started tracking my sleep using the Oura ring. It's amazing, it tracks all different kinds of sleep, tells you how much and how well you slept last night, even tracks your heart rate and gives a sleep score out of 100 the next morning. It also gives you a readiness score depending on your quality of sleep, which tells you how prepared and awake are you to take on the world.

I take the readiness score very seriously. If on some day the readiness score isn't good, but I've some important work lined up. I'll restructure my day or put things off for later but I'll not go at it with a bad night sleep. If I didn't sleep well, I'll not be 100% at work.

Ever since I started tracking sleep, I have gotten exposed to some very interesting insights about my sleep. For example, I got to know that my sleep cycle starts off later in the day than usual, that means I've to stay in bed for longer in the morning to get proper sleep. That's the reason I stopped forcing myself to wake up early, now I only get up after 8:30 in the morning.

I actually completely stopped putting any alarm for Mondays. I just let myself get full sleep. Even if that means I've to wake up later than everyone else, I don't mind. It's the quality of sleep that determines the quality of wakefulness.

It's time we start paying attention to our sleep quality. All the productivity tricks and fitness regimes are no good without quality sleep."

It'll be safe to say that Charlie 'woke' us (pun totally intended) all up to how important our sleep really is and how much we all neglect it. Ok I'm going off to nap, I'll write the rest of the blog later.

Joking, I'm here. Let's get this first!

In this episode, Charlie talks about how started his company for helping marketing leaders make better strategies, a typical day in his life, calendar blocking, no meeting Mondays, tracking and optimizing sleep quality, what he'd do with an extra hour if he magically got one, and more.

Let's diveee in!!!

Charlie introduces himself

Hi I'm Charlie, co-founder and CEO, RightMetric. We are a searchable library of data-backed case-studies for marketing leaders and their teams. Basically, we provide quick answers to hard questions for marketing leaders while they build strategy.

To give you an example, let's say you work at Nike's marketing team. Now you've visibility into marketing strategies and tactics inside Nike. But wouldn't it be great, if you could see the marketing strategies, tactics, spends and results for Adidas? That would help so much in seeing what's working and what's not working for a brand that serves a similar audience. That's something you can accomplish with the case studies we have on RightMetric. Not to forget that all our case studies are data backed, so we're definitely not sharing random stories or opinions. We always back it up with numbers.

The beginnings

I worked on the brand side in marketing for many many years. My co-founder and I felt that we always had a really good idea of insights and data from our brands. We knew how many people were coming to our website, and how many people were opening our emails. We even wanted to look outside of our 4 walls, look at what competitors are doing, look at what best-in-class marketing examples look like.

But there wasn't an easy way to do that. If there was, it was either very expensive or time consuming. So we thought there's an opportunity here. A lot of other marketers were also facing the problem we were facing, so we started RightMetric. We now have our software product, which is the insights library. It's been quite a journey over the past 3 years.

Typical day in life

The pandemic has eased out my day by cutting on the commute time. Now my commute is across my apartment to my office, doesn't even take a minute.

Besides, I don't like waking up early. I wake up at 8:30-9:00 in the morning. I get in front of my computer between 9:45-10:00. A lot of day is dealing with emails, a ton of emails. Our team works on Basecamp, so that's another software I check after I wake up. Then I get on a meeting if I have one scheduled, else I just get on with my work. At our company, I'm responsible for sales and client success. While my co-founder takes care of marketing and product.

I end my workday by 5 or 6 at max. We have clear boundaries to establish work life balance and the company is at a stage that we can work 40 hour weeks and get done all we need to get done.

Calendar blocking

I live by my calendar. If I have a task on my to-do list that'll take some time/focus to accomplish, I'll block an hour (or more) on my calendar for doing that. Every important task gets blocked on my calendar to make sure I do them during the blocked time, so that nothing else can be scheduled there as I already have it blocked for my task. This is like marrying your to-do list to the calendar, which I feel is very important to get stuff done on time.

No Meeting Mondays

I've a rule that I don't take any meetings on Mondays. Except just one 15-minute call with my co-founder. All of Monday is reserved for deep focused work.

Ever since I started doing this, I feel a lot more productive and a lot more calmer. If you start your week by prioritizing focused work, it sets a nice tone for the rest of the week and you feel good for having done some tangible work right at the start of the week. No meeting Mondays are the best.

Tracking and Optimizing for Sleep

A lot of people are always trying out different fitness routines, different productivity hacks and all sorts of things. But one thing that gets ignored the most is sleep. We spend 1/3 of our lives sleeping but I don't see enough people trying to optimize their sleep quality.

It's time we start paying attention to our sleep quality. All the productivity tricks and fitness regimes are no good without quality sleep.

Building new habits

Most of the recent habits I've built are related to Covid. Wearing a mask, social distancing and things like that. Besides, I've been trying to take my meetings while walking.

Another habit I'm trying to build is to stop working after my work hours. What I used to do earlier is get back home have dinner, the again start working. But that's not healthy. Work will remain there even the next day, it's not going away. So having strict boundaries is important. Mailman has helped me do that by preventing new emails from coming in after a certain time of the day. It helps me stay away from work a lot better.

One extra hour

If I get one extra hour in my day, I'd probably add one additional hour of sleep, or I'd spend it with family and friends. Sleep being the more selfish answer.

How to reach Charlie?

I'm at @charliegrinnell on twitter. Also pretty active on Linkedin. You can also check our website RightMetric.co. Always happy to chat with anyone who reaches out!