With a busy schedule, shift work and a young family I felt I had to adjust my working, sleeping and living to create a whole new spatial cocoon - and so 4am became the 'new' midnight.
Originally the 28-hour day was designed as a time management system used by students and people with jobs that require flexible work hours and is based on the 2 key principles:
A sleep period of eight to nine hours is enough to fully recover from more than 16 hours awake for most healthy people.
The number of hours per week (168) is evenly divisible into six 28-hour days.
People living by the 28-hour day stay awake for 19 to 20 hours and then sleep eight to nine hours, depending on need. This creates a six day week. Early research into circadian rhythms suggested that most people preferred a day closer to 25 hours when isolated from external stimuli like daylight and timekeeping. Researchers allowed subjects to keep electric lighting on in the evening, as it was thought at that time that a couple of 60W bulbs would not have a re-setting effect on the circadian rhythms of humans.
Credit: XKCD
However, more recent research has shown that adults have a built-in day which averages just over 24 hours, that indoor lighting does affect circadian rhythms, and that most healthy, normal people cannot reset their clocks to 28 hours. In addition most regular schedules and opening hours did not match the 6 day week cycle week cycle, so alternative strategy and compromises had to be devised.
I now operate on a different kind of 28 hour day. Instead of going to sleep at midnight (8 hours work, 8 hours play, 8 hours sleep) - I go to bed at 4am...thus creating an extra four hours in every day! (16 hours work, 4 hours play, 4 hours sleep)...brilliant! - well not according to Rives from the TED blog at least.
