Polyphasic Sleep in USA Today

In today’s (Feb 27th) edition of USA Today, you can find a feature article about sleep by Marco R. della Cava titled, “When Sleep is Just a Dream.” Marco interviewed my wife and me a few weeks ago for the article, so the last several paragraphs of the article are about my polyphasic sleeping pattern. The article ends with a quote from my wife, Erin: “I don’t think I’ll be trying this. I really like my sleep.”

I haven’t seen the print version yet (it’s only 3:30am as I type this) [edit: just picked up a copy], and the article should be in is featured dead center on page one of today’s print edition as well as on USA Today’s web site.

USA Today supposedly has 2.2 million readers, so the offline publicity is nice, and now of course I can add the phrase, “As seen in USA Today” to my web site, my promotional materials (what promotional materials?), and my underwear. But aside from the “that’s cool” factor, I don’t expect to notice much traffic increase from this, especially since my URL wasn’t mentioned in the article. A few years ago I had a story about my games business published in the New York Times, along with a photo of my daughter and me, and the traffic boost was essentially nil.

I prefer to be interviewed about other personal development topics (purpose, productivity, self-discipline, etc) instead of polyphasic sleep, but it doesn’t surprise me that the general weirdness of polyphasic sleep would capture the interest of a journalist.

If I recall correctly, the writer found me via this blog, if not directly then certainly indirectly by way of referral. I remember telling my wife a few months ago that given the traffic growth of this site, it’s only a matter of time before all this online traffic starts spilling into the offline world. I have that same expectation of the blogosphere in general.

USA today, tomorrow the world. 😉

P.S. For those of you who did manage to stumble upon this site because of the USA Today article and who are curious to learn more about polyphasic sleep, here are all my previous entries on the subject (the first entry below will explain what polyphasic sleep entails):

And for something less severe (i.e. if you prefer to continue sleeping normally at night but would like to improve your sleeping habits), read:

Sleep well!