Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on Seattle 2.0, and imported to GeekWire as part of our acquisition of Seattle 2.0 and its archival content. For more background, see this post.

By Sasha Pasulka

I hear a lot of people say that they can’t nap. They can lie down, they say, but they can’t fall asleep during the day. I love napping. It’s one of my favorite activities. But before I started my company, I was one of those people who said they couldn’t nap. In retrospect, it wasn’t that I couldn’t nap, it was just that I’d never been presented with such an overwhelming need to nap as during those first couple years of new-company insanity.

For the first two years, my media company was a one-man show. A one-man show without funding. So I did everything myself. I wrote all the code, I found all the advertisers, I managed all the PR, all the biz dev, and I created all the content. Since the flagship product was a celebrity gossip website, I needed to be awake basically twenty-four hours a day, in case important news broke. (If you think that a Mariah Carey pregnancy announcement or a Lindsay Lohan upskirt shot isn’t the kind of news that needs to be covered immediately, you don’t understand this market.)

To make sure we had round-the-clock news coverage, I would often go to bed at 4 am and wake up around 8 am, writing constantly during the day and spending time at night tweaking code, researching new monetization opportunities and begging larger news organizations to give us publicity. I loved every minute of it, and I wouldn’t trade those late nights and early mornings for anything. But no matter how badly I wanted to think I could exist indefinitely on four hours’ sleep a day, it simply was not true.

I had to nap.

So I got into a fairly consistent routine. I’d nap between 10:30 am and noon and again from 4:30 pm to 6. Because I felt too “lazy” sleeping in my bed during the day, I would grab a blanket and pillow and curl up on the couch with my laptop on the table next to me. I wasn’t going to bed, I was just taking a little break. This allowed me to, for all intents and purposes, be awake around the clock, but still get 7 or 8 hours of sleep daily. I functioned like that for over two years, before finally giving in and hiring help … for weekend news coverage, so I could rest a couple days a week. Then I went another six months before I absolutely couldn’t handle it anymore and hired a full staff. Then I slept for about a year straight. 

The point is this: In the early stages of building a company you love, it’s easy to get carried away and work around the clock. You want to be working around the clock. That’s sustainable in the short term, but not over months and years. If you can’t get a normal night’s sleep during the early days of your company, make sure to carve out some hours during the day to curl up under your desk with a blanket and a pillow and take a little snooze. You’ll function better during the hours that you are awake, and you’ll be able to sustain a crazy startup lifestyle without complete physical burnout for longer than you would otherwise.

If you’ve been working around the clock and you still can’t manage to fall asleep when you close your eyes midday, consider – just consider – toning down the coffee intake. I know it seems impossible, but I went completely off caffeine around the same time I started my company, and it made a world of difference in my health, my anxiety level, my decision-making skills and my ability to get some real rest. To this day, I rarely even drink a Pepsi, and I love my decaf life. Which includes lots and lots of naps. 

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