I have scheduled a week off of work to adapt to polyphasic sleep, so I don't have to worry about making mistakes while sleep deprived.
Following Matt's advice, I am not just adopting my desired schedule of everyman-3, but instead temporarily adopt a "uberman-12" schedule, that is, 12 20 minute naps a day, 1 every 2 hours. The idea is to train myself to get REM sleep during the 20 minute naps, because that is all the sleep that is available, while running off of reserves of slow wave sleep. I am going in expecting 3 hard days before I start getting the REM, at which point I start backing off the naps to 1 every four hours (standard uberman) until I run out of slow wave reserves at the end of the week when I add in the core and cut back to 3 naps a day.
I will also be skipping lunch and dinner on the day of my first night of adaption, which is supposed to help me adapt to a new sleep schedule. And keeping up an exercise routine. And I will have friends help keep me on schedule.
This sounds like a good plan. I admit I didn't do much research before giving it a try. I found a blog here where the author seems to be attempting a similar approach. The last entry is "Night 45" & he still seems to be struggling to adapt, so I would be cautious that scheduling 1 week may be on the optimistic side.
This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for the week of August 20th. It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:
Or anything else interesting which you want to share, so that other people can think about it, and perhaps be inspired to take action themselves. Try to include enough details so that everyone can use each other's experiences to learn about what tends to work out, and what doesn't tend to work out.
Thanks to everyone who contributes!
Last week's diary; archive of prior diaries.