I was skeptical about Daniel Pink’s Nappuccino concept, but being the empiricist that I am, I had to give it a really try. So for the past week or so, at 2:30pm when my productivity usually comes to a halt with the mid-afternoon slump, I’ve started this practice.
I brew a Nesspresso single shot and sit down in my office’s reading chair with a timer set for 25 minutes. I’ve used just a phone timer mostly, but today I tried the Tide app which was recommended by A.B. Watson as a Pomidoro timer app. The app provides not only a timer, but background sounds like rain, etc. I’m not sure I need the sound addition as long as the house is quite enough.
The idea is that the time to caffeine’s effect is about 20 or 30 minutes, so it’s kicking in at the end of the nap. A recent study I found puts the Tmax (time to maximal plasma concentration of caffeine) at 1 hour. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s sipped hot coffee or a quickly downed energy drink. But I guess onset at 30 minutes is fair enough from my subjective point of view, so there’s minimal post nap grogginess and the coffee probably pushes the feeling of alertness up over the next half hour or so as a bonus.
At any rate, the coffee doesn’t interfere with the nap. There’s a bit of stress associated with a timed nap, but it’s easy to have the attitude that if sleep doesn’t come, the coffee works anyway. But I’ve had a shallow dose every time I’ve tried so far.
The proof of efficacy is in my increased posting here and Flickr output.