But are you really just spinning your wheels when you work late?

It's also possible that the time you spent the night before was precisely what allowed you to figure out the solution so quickly in the morning.

I've had the same experience, where I've tried lots of strategies that don't work, only to have the solution hit me suddenly, hours (or even days!) later. Perhaps you would've discovered the resolution to your problem without spending time on it the night before, but I wouldn't underestimate the power of putting in your due diligence and then sleeping on it.

I've started sleeping with earplugs as well, but I wonder if there are any negative long-term impacts to spending 6+ hours with them in every night?

I find them quite uncomfortable physically. I also have slight tinnitus, so once they go in I can really hear it. But I find the tradeoff for uninterrupted sleep worth it (I try to sleep without them on the weekend when I don't have to get up early for work).

I spent the first 30 years of my "career" living on 4-6 hours a night, with extended periods  my recording studio days when I worked non-stop through the weekend: Friday to Monday morning. During that period, I made at least 6 "lazy" goofballs into millionaires. On the music side of my life, I burned through two business partners and three small businesses; all profitable but unsustainable because I wouldn't quit my full time "real jobs." For the most part, I had no focus for my own career path or personal welfare of any sort. In my early 50's, I burned out. Couldn't even read a newspaper headline and I'm, normally, a 5-8,000wpm reader. I was, literally, forced to quit my high paying, high pressure job and wait for the sky to fall. After about a year, I took a part-time teaching job at a music school and figured that I'd keep that going until I ran out of money and had to go back to "work." 14 years later, I'm retiring with a healthy retirement bank balance and an opportunity to do all sorts of things I could have never considered when I was in the grind.

Tynan, you are brilliant to be so focused on the things that matter while you are young. For a change, youth isn't being wasted on the young.

I totally agree about the importance of good sleep, and limiting late-night screen use is a great first step to getting a consistent sleep schedule. 

However, I couldn't just let my body decide how long I want to sleep. If I don't set an alarm, I almost always end up sleeping for 11 hours, day after day. Obviously I don't want that, especially since I don't feel any better after sleeping for so long.

Some time ago I wrote an article about tracking sleep on a smartphone. Some of you may find it useful.

Great post, I love the picture. I couldn't agree more with all your advice, it's imparative that we keep our circadian rhythm in tact for optimal health and maximum performance. The one thing I was hoping to see was the importance of sleeping grounded, especially from a nomad. Sleeping in an earthing sheet can help tremendously when regularly traveling to different time zones, it helps to synchronize the body with the local time zone and bypass jet lag. Check out what the Bullet Proof Executive, Dave Asprey, has to say about sleeping grounded> How I Killed Jet Lag and Got More REM Sleep Too

Yes I agree with U tyan... This is your first post i read and i love it....
My suggestion is we all should start attending college because it helps in getting better sleep at night :p

Yes, good sleep is an incredibly effective and productive tactic. I should really implement the no-electronics-after 10 policy. I have a habit of being in the middle of doing a few things on the Internet at that point in the night, IRC, facebook, IM chats. It would probably be a good idea to gradually shut each off in turn, one by one, to kind of cool my head down so I'm more able to transition to a restful state of mind. Then probably read some books, or converse with a roommate, or reflect on the day, or write out my thoughts (with pen and paper, of course). What else is there to do without electronics... Stretching,  cleaning, taking a walk outside maybe.

Would probably be extremely beneficial for my work productivity, as well as general happiness.

(I'm typing this out not really because I think you guys necessarily care, but more to make it stick in my mind)

* By the way, Tynan: a bug submission. This "write your post" form disappeared after I had submitted my replies to the other comments.

I love getting a good night's sleep.  I struggled with sleep in my early years, lying in bed for hours waiting for sleep to arrive.  It was awful.  I'd wake up tired every morning and remain sleepy for a big chunk of the day. 

I do most of the same things you listed here, but the thing that helped the most was learning some good techniques to fall asleep.  I struggled with this in the pre-Internet days, so there wasn't much good information available on how to fall asleep.  I ended up figuring out my own technique and through much practice learned to fall asleep in about 5 minutes. 

About a year ago I revisited the idea of learning to fall asleep and documented my technique in an ebook.  Here's a link in case anyone is in the same boat of not being able to fall asleep.  http://www.amazon.com/Set-Your-Sleep-Autopilot-ebook/dp/B008DVCHIG

The things that helped me the most was to learn some muscle relaxation techniques and some meditation techniques.  The trick that often gets overlooked is that you need to relax your body and quiet your mind.  Even if  you aren't interested in the book, you can research these types of techniques to develop your own going-to-sleep process.