How to Turn Sleepless Nights Into Winning Business Proposals and Other Great Ideas 0

It’s three o’clock in the morning and you can’t sleep. Topics buzz in and out of your head; a brilliant solution for a winning business proposal, where to go on an ideal vacation, several ways to save the world, and what was that strange little caterpillar descending a fine filament from a tree ten feet above the garden?

Another thought comes up – and then another – and the first one vanishes because it’s hard to hang on to everything speeding through the synapses. If you’ve ever written a couple of paragraphs or a speech you’re particularly proud of and the computer crashes, you’ll know what I mean. Try and recreate that material. I swear it’ll never be as good as the original.

I tell people all the time to keep a notebook beside the bed just to record those important ideas. But how good are we at actually jotting them down? You don’t want to turn the light on and wake your partner. So you creep out to the kitchen to make a sandwich – and promptly forget the idea.

This trouble-getting-to-sleep routine happens to most of us. My wife and I alternate – when I have a great night’s sleep she’s restless, and vice versa. It gets exacerbated by summer heat, a stuffy room and that late (but delicious) meal now residing uncomfortably in your digestive system.

Because sleep is miles away and your brain is paying no attention to your 8-hour rest regimen, you decide to get up. How long do you stay up? As long as it takes to feel sufficiently tired to go back to bed. Drinking coffee or tea will make it worse so stick to water. (If you’re reading this at 4 am, get some water now.)

Believe it or not, getting up instead of struggling to find sleep can be a great opportunity. This is the time to write a winning proposal. This is the time to get to the core of a comedy routine. If you have some ideas that seem to be percolating nicely, this is the time to pay attention to them because memory is so fickle. Get distracted by food, or something to drink, or late night infomercials is all it takes for a million dollar idea to completely disappear. What’s the solution?

Get up and get down on paper all that buzz generated between midnight and 3 am. How am I going to do this project? What steps must I take in order to move forward with it? When am I going to take enough time off to be with the kids?

And while you’re at it, focus! Stay at your desk or table, don’t play a game or check your e-mail, and don’t think about that warm bed that you couldn’t get to sleep in anyway. Do have a glass of water handy so your writing doesn’t suffer from dehydration. And do as good a job as possible of finishing what you’re doing, or at least have an outline, or key ideas in place so that when you revisit in the full glare of day, what you’ve done makes sense.

Like any medication, there are side effects that the profession never tells you about. You may not recognize anything you’ve written down when morning actually comes. You may scrap what you’ve scribbled in its entirety. On the other hand you may capture some gems that only emerge into the light on a sleepless night – even a winning business proposal.