Soldiers, politicians, artists, professionals all need periods of rest and replenishment. On a more regular basis, sleep serves the function of ending a day and allowing one to start anew during the next. In many parts of Asia, a new day signifies a completely new beginning where the profits or losses of the previous day are completely forgotten, as one seeks to have a net gain by the time sleep calls once again. In the life of a student, sleep plays a vital role in maintaining his ability to perform high level analysis and to create new forms of knowledge both for himself and for the world. For that reason, sleep is a precious commodity indeed.

For some students, however, this precious commodity is rather scarce. External forces as well as internal ones create dramatic opposition to the student’s ability to garner an appropriate amount of sleep. Proper applications of chess theory to my crusade for obtaining greater amounts of regular sleep would prove very useful.

Let me first describe the situation. Ever since I came to Penn, there have been an increasing number of elements that have been vying for use of my time. Not only have these elements grown in number, they have sought to drain me of free hours with an ever increasing tenacity. In the same period of time, I have grown less and less able to withstand long periods without proper sleep. While my resistance to sleep deprivation peaked during my sophomore year — when I averaged over one all-nighter per week — I have steadily declined in the number of all night efforts of which I can physically withstand. Looking at my senior year, there are five main categories (the five S’s) that take up the overwhelming majority of my life. They are:

• SCUE — The Student Committee on Undergraduate Education for which I serve as chair produces six levels of time commitment on its own.
• Internal personnel problem solving, mentoring, direction, and interaction.
• External representation and ad hoc meetings.
• External committees.
• Subject area research.
• Administrative decision making.
• Campus wide face time.
• Studies — Six courses.
• Search — A senior job search process.
• Socializing — A group of friends, acquaintances, and relative strangers who have decided that they would like to help deprive me of sleep.
• Self — an intrinsic tendency to procrastinate and find odd tasks to occupy time that is much better served sleeping.

As may be evident from the above list, it is rather difficult to get a bearing on all the factors that are involved in the attempt to deprive me of as much sleep as possible. Indeed, most of these factors work almost completely independently, the only link being their desire for my time. In my analysis, I will use material to describe the amount of sleep that the activity deprives me and positional as the way in which the item goes about in trying to deprive me of sleep. To explain the relationship of the five S’s to me I have constructed Diagram 1.

Though the last four S’s are primarily self explanatory, SCUE needs further definition for those not familiar with the operations of the group. SCUE is by far the most materially complex of the five S’s. SCUE is an undergraduate education think tank and lobbying group that has been responsible for most major curricular changes at the University over the past thirty years. SCUE is structured in such a way that all of our work is grounded in research and is kept completely secret until its publication. For the sake of consistency, the Chair of SCUE is the only person who is allowed to speak on SCUE’s behalf to the outside world.

Due to that fact, the chair of SCUE must always keep ahead of higher education news, goings on at the University, and general education theory, while conducting research and working within topical subcommittees to produce future publications. He is the foremost student expert on all academic matters at the University and therefore sits on numerous external committees. The chair of SCUE must also run the committee that is composed of over thirty very intelligent, very opinionated students who differ in opinion from one another on almost any point imaginable. On top of all that, the chair must approve all administrative purchases, requests, and problem solving that account for an annual budget of over twenty thousand dollars. The nature of the work is capricious in its schedule because emergency external meetings, membership problems, and university wide happenings occur at a tremendously high frequency and never on a predictable schedule. Thus the tremendous material variability involved with SCUE.

Two far easier to understand and predict S’s are studies and the job search. Both have a clear schedule that is well defined beforehand with relative straight forward expectations being set ahead of time. They are also rather inflexible in their structure which is not accommodating to certain urgent situations. They are by far the materially and positionally simplest of the five. Though both are very varied in their material ambitions, those ambitions — unlike in SCUE — are mapped ahead of time and present no element of surprise.

Socializing is slightly more complex than the previous two both materially and positionally. However, it is also the least significant of the five since, based on my own utility, it is the easiest to compromise. It is only on the rarest of occasions that a socializing event compromises my position to an extent in which an undesirable trade off of sleep is forced upon me. However, when such events do occur they are almost always unexpected and do not fit within a preset agenda and therefore present a positional challenge. However, they will usually fall on week-ends or Thursday nights which provides some form of predictability to them.

The last S which is the second most materially complex is the Self. Let me make it perfectly clear that this self is not the self that is working to increase the amount I sleep; rather it is a member of the enemy camp that deprives me of time, primarily via obstruction of proceeding with efficiently addressing of other S’s. The Self can be predictable as far as the time in which it will strike, but the form that it will take will usually vary dramatically and is therefore more difficult to combat.

The diagram illustrates several key aspects of the relative positional strengths of my five opponents. The size of the circle represents the relative time commitment which each component accounts for. The darker the circle, the more tiring is each relative moment spent performing the task. So, even though SCUE takes up the largest amount of time, performing all of my SCUE duties in a day will most likely be less tiring than performing my tasks for studying over the same period. The dotted lines represent directly correlated feeding mechanisms — that is to say that as the source bubbles grow so do the end bubbles. For example, the more SCUE, Study, or Search work I have, the more will my self produce barriers to complete the work, since motivation for completing tasks will be limited as the end becomes a more distant goal. This relationship also works in the inverse as a smaller Self bubble is the key to waging effective combat against the other three opponents (socializing is in a separate class in this sense). This is represented by the small f(Self) functions attached to each of the other three bubbles.

Currently, the five S’s have managed to invade into my preferred sleep buffer cutting it by over 35% of the desired level. The question is how to combat them effectively and push them back to allow for at least a daily dose of eight hours of sleep. The answer lies in a complex set of moves that must be carefully calculated.

Currently, even though I have given up significant amounts of sleep, I am not up to date in all of my coursework. As I mentioned above, the longer I wait to handle such projects, the greater my Self will become resistant to completing them efficiently. It is also clear that the nature of the Self-dependent function, which helps control the size of SCUE, Study, and Search work, is essential in trying to fight for my sleep time. With all of these factors in mind, it seems clear that a combinational style of attack would be most appropriate.

First and foremost I must set a preliminary goal to try to reduce the presence of Self in my work matrix. Even though Self time does not seem to be as bad a substitute for sleep as most other activities, it is in the greater ramifications that one must look to see the real damage of a large bubble in such an area. The more I allow myself to meander and waste time, the more I will suffer for it as my SCUE, Study, and Search work will pile on. Because they are circularly feeding mechanisms, the Self will grow larger as well in a truly vicious cycle. Therefore, I must make a material sacrifice for positional advantage in trying to consciously reduce the overwhelming majority of Self-related problems that I face. Because my opponent in this area is indeed myself, the exercise will be an appropriate initial combinational goal since predictability can be expected. That is to say that while the Self’s material manifestations vary with time, its positional strategies are well known since they are derived from the same source as my genuine desire for sleep.

The next items to tackle would be fully predictable simple opponents (namely studies and job search). Because both of these opponents have almost no positional or material surprises and both have high material variability, it is relatively simple to construct a regimented calendar to deal with them. In order to begin, however, I must make another material sacrifice by giving up a good deal of sleep in order to catch up in at least half of my classes (those that I have fallen behind in). At that point, I should plan out when high levels of exertion should be placed on studies due to increased material drives and limit time spent on other areas such as SCUE and socializing.

Once this conditional goal is complete, it will pave the way to tackle the most difficult goal — taming SCUE and socializing. Though these two factors are very different as far as burden level, they are both highly unpredictable. Here, the combinational style will no longer be appropriate. In truly dynamic systems — where challenges arise following no real set rules — it is difficult to fix an intermediate goal to conquer. Often times, this goal loses its value by the time it is attained. Therefore, a positional approach is far better. It serves me well to react to goings on (such as emergency meetings) and be proactive in moving things forward (such as merging planned meetings). It is at the point where I can develop a proper positional methodology to deal with SCUE and socializing that I will be able to recapture my daily eight hours of sleep.

Though the five S’s present formidable foes, their predominantly independent nature makes them easy to tackle one by one. By using the combinational style early on thus removing three large opponents and then moving to combat the remaining two via the positional style, my goal of a daily good night’s sleep can be accomplished. In order to achieve that goal I will have to make some significant material sacrifices up front; however, these sacrifices will pay off in the end, as I will be capable of effectively managing my schedule. At that point, I will be able to be a better student, SCUE leader, job seeker, socializer, and overall Self.

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