Figuring out naptime for programmers (and other DND tasks)

I’ve been up since roughly 9 PM last night working on the Shockey Monkey service desk enhancements and so far the evening has been quite productive. I’d venture to guess that my output tonight has been greater than it has been over the past few days combined.

The secret to it is that practically nothing happens overnight. Nobody needs to talk to me urgently, no fires need to be put out, nobody needs to have a manual read out to them over the phone or over trouble tickets, there are no issues, nobody needs a quick minute or a quick meeting or a presentation or tickets to an event…

It’s just me and Benz, and an occasionally frightening episode of Coast to Coast to keep me awake.

Obviously, allnighters become exceedingly difficult the further you get away from college and to be honest, I’d rather take a 2 hour nap in the afternoon and trade it off for the 2 hours at the crack of dawn where I can actually focus and get stuff done.

This goes for any do not disturb task, it is nearly impossible to focus during the day with all the distractions and while I do have a sofa in my office I tend to sleep on it as I imagine I would on a bet of nails and broken glass – the moment my back touches it I jump back up – be it for the phone, forgetting to mute the sound and an IM coming through, not flagging the phone and Office Communicator in the DND mode… you name it.

So I have one question that I hope someone out there has figured out (come on Pablo!) – how do you effectively trade daytime nap hours for the midnight work hours? Is there a way to establish a long term sleep pattern that involves two sleep sessions in the 24 hour span? If so, whats your trick?