I've learned (and adapted) to the fact that I just can't get any reasonable work done in the first 3 hours or so of the day. I can ingest massive amounts of caffeine, go run a marathon, or whatever, but my brain just needs a few hours to get up to speed.
You might find that, like myself, you function much better in the evening and night. Even though I keep a normal daylight schedule for work reasons, I long to fall back to my natural rythmn: rise at 4pm, and sleep at 7 or 8am.
For a long time I thought I followed the same schedule. Since I'm in grad school, I decided to experiment with that. I found that I was not a night person after all. Rather, anxiety and thinking about a given problem kept me up indefinitely.
I even tried the experiment where you stay up until you are tired, then repeat. It was terrible. After a week I could not sleep at all. I'd get tired when the sun set, as we are supposed to. But despite being tired, no sleep came.
Through much pain, I discovered that the major source of my sleeplessness was a lack of social contact. Now this varies immensely by individual. But the moral of the story is that every sleep problem is unique. Your solution is not my solution. And mine is not yours (I don't have a good one btw).
I'll guess that sleep researchers already know this. Best of luck hacker news!
While writing up my PhD I went through three different sleep styles, each time for four months.
The first was to work nights. I'd get up at 15:30, "breakfast" at 17:00, socialise from 18:00 to 20:00, then go to work. I'd eat my last meal at 07:00 (bacon eaggs and toast are an interesting "last meal of the day") and go to bed at 09:00.
The second was to sleep every other night, sleeping for 12 hours when I sis sleep at all. The night I stayed up I'd catch a cat nap at about 03:00 for 20 minutes. This was effectively a 48 hour day.
The third and most interesting was to stick to a 28 hour day with 8 hours sleep. This gives a 6 day week, and I'd drift in and out of phase with normal people. That really suited me, and I wish I could do it more.
