Hour 29:

By 3pm on Friday, I was definitely starting to feel some fatigue.  Part of that was that my eating schedule had been messed up. I didn't really have a normal breakfast and lunch I walked over to McDonalds and had a burger and coke.

I had a ton of meetings late afternoon on Friday and was able to function at relative full capacity.

Hour 33:

By 7pm I was ready to come home. Having gotten home and had dinner, I found myself abruptly starting to nod off. It came pretty suddenly and before 8pm had rolled around, I had walked upstairs to our bedroom and gone to bed. I was out probably within 10 minutes.

12AM Saturday:

With almost 5 hours of sleep, I woke up and actually felt pretty refreshed. This is when I probably should have gotten up but didn't have the discipline to just get up.  So I went back to sleep.

4AM Saturday:

With 8 hours of sleep, I woke up and felt ready to get up. In fact, I had that feeling of having had too much sleep. So I decided to just get up.  I feel a bit groggy -- not tired but that feeling of having slept too much.  So my hours are officially a bit messed up.

And so here I am now at 5am blogging about it.

Results:

I definitely got a lot done. I had a list that ended up with 43 things on it.  I got around 35 of the things done. 4 of the things on the list became obsolete before I got to them and the only things I didn't get to was contacting a couple people I wanted to contact and doing some pretty tedious busy work things that I've been putting off (and continued to put off).

My ability to concentrate definitely took a hit after hour 20. I didn't get any of the programming done that I had had on the list but my deadline on that got changed dramatically so the pressure to work on coding in the all-nighter was removed. I think I would have been able to do it adequately but I think I was definitely down by 10% by hour 20.

By hour 25, I would say my cognitituve ability was down around 20%. My verbal skills and such were fine. 

What was most affected by the sleep deprivation was my perception control. As the CEO bof a company, I have to keep tight control over my behavior. In my case, I tend to use excess humor and babble.  And I was definitely talking for the sake of talking by hour 25 and beyond. It's like I was talking in order to keep my brain functioning. I was even talking to myself (in the sense of thinking out loud).  The thinking out-loud caused me some embarassment.

Overall, I'd say it was definitely worth doing in order to get the things done I needed to get done. I think with some chemical help I could have stayed up another 24 hours without much problem and gotten even more done. But that kind of strain is only justifiable if there is enough pressing things to do and I was getting to the point of doing tedious stuff that I've just been putting off.