One day I heard a trivia on radio discussing how many hours you spend on sleeping each day and multiply that for the next ten years.

I suddenly became curious and began my own calculations. If I sleep 8 hours a day starting at the age of 10 until the age of 50 that would be 40 (yrs) x 1/3 (day) = 13.33 years. Whoaah! That’s a lot of sleep.

Let’s try to extend this more. Let’s say we spend 2 hours for both lunch and dinner, 1.5 hours for both breakfast and 3 snacks a day then that would be 3.5 hours for eating.

How about transportation? Let’s put 2 hours for the entire travel we make in a day.

How about allotting 3 hours for personal hygiene, chat with officemates and other unproductive disturbances throughout the day?

To sum it up:

Sleeping—8 hours
Eating—3.5 hours
Traveling—2 hours
Other things—3 hours
————————————-

Total: 16.5 hours

Now by using our previous formula of 40 yrs x hours/24 we have spent 27.5 years by the age of 50 on sleeping, eating, traveling and other non-high productive activities.

Geesh, that’s ridiculous. Wait, didn’t I start my calculations at the age of ten? How many hours of sleep and play did we actually spend by the time we reached that age? Oh man, do the math.

Oh, didn’t the title say 60 years and 20 sleeping years? Just do the math again!

The Personal Efficiency Program : How to Get Organized to Do More Work in Less Time