Why pulling an all-nighter just isn’t worth it

IT’S never worth it. Even though this time last year in this same column I recommended it, I was talking through my fundament.

You can check your leather-bound scrapbook — the one in which no doubt, you’ve kept all my articles. “There’s no better way to get things done” I wrote or something along those lines.

I’m talking about the all-nighter — the tremendous feat of human achievement where you work all night to do all the work that you were supposed to do in time for a perfectly reasonable deadline but because of procrastination and dossing, you are now in a panic.

I am not talking about shift-workers or people responding to last-minute changes in plan, or heroic junior doctors who are ‘this’ far away from fecking off to Australia if they have to work another 48 hours in a row.

This is about the time-wasters, the Leaving Cert students WhatsApping their OMGs and WTFs to each other, the college final year projects where three months’ work was done in 36 hours, the people who brought work home.

Once you’ve decided to do it, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. I think I believe that the hours of night-time are actually infinite. The same principle probably holds for people who think the magic sleep will get rid of ‘all the pints’ although thankfully that belief is gradually fading. Maybe it was the Ladybird Book story of the Elves and the Shoemaker, when the elves pulled an all-nighter and made all his shoes magically by morning. The elves were not on the internet taking a quiz on “Which Game Of Thrones Character Are You”?

This particular all-nighter followed a familiar pattern. Productivity waned during the day. Tasks were postponed: “I’ll leave that ’til tonight when I won’t be distracted by phone calls/birdsong/daylight”.

But if you are the type of person who is distracted during the day by looking up the Wikipedia page of Bolivia’s mining industry, then that is not going to change at night. The internet is always there.

By evening, I was actively preparing for this all-night work binge instead of ... um ... you know trying to reduce its necessity by like, um ... working.

“I’ll watch Fargo first just to unwind and then my mind will be ready for the challenge ahead,” I said, to no one in particular, the world having given up on me in exasperation at this stage.

It was 10pm before I actually started work. I was wrecked and got a relatively small chunk of my work done.

Now, there were some flashes of insight at about 6am that maybe wouldn’t have occurred at 3pm the previous day but correlation is not causation. The upshot of it all was that I estimated by 10am the following morning I had done about as much I would have done by 5pm the previous evening if I’d copped on.

So no more all-nighters for me and to those starting their leaving cert exams on Wednesday, good luck. Whatever you do — get some sleep.