The best session I attended at SXSW was not about group messaging, responsive design, social media monitoring or Felicia Day’s show. It was about energy. Tony Schwartz, Founder of The Energy Project (@energy_project), held a session titled “The 90 Minute Solution: Live Like a Sprinter,” based on his theory that humans aren’t meant to run like computers–at high speeds, continuously, for long periods of time (marathoners)–but rather to pulse rhythmically between spending energy and intermittently renewing it (sprinters).

Makes sense in theory, right? At the most basic level, humans sleep and computers don’t. But what about the waking hours? How do we run our lives when we’re not sleeping less than 6.5 hours a night?*

Most of us live like sprinters. We respond to more demand by pushing harder, faster and longer. Trade an hour of sleep for an hour of [insert more productive activity]. We make ourselves available to any and all demands on our attention, all the time, because we can. How often do we shut down our email, turn off the phone, and spend one hour doing one thing with intense focus? How many of us check email/Twitter before sleeping and immediately upon waking, and even (ahem) sleep with our iPhone next to our bed?

These were the questions Tony posed, not ironically, to a most guilty audience. In his own Huffington Post recap of the event he states:

“Peering out into that vast hall, I fear I saw the future: a sea of the digital elite hunched over blinking technologies, tweeting and texting as I talked.

I wasn’t so worried about my own sanity — I was only doing one thing at a time, after all — but I was a little concerned about theirs. We’ve truly entered a world of nonstop input and output.”

So what do we do? Isn’t living and working this way the nature of the beast, particularly in the marketing/advertising/communications space, where instant action and response are expected, if not required? It’s something we talk about often here at CTP.

Tony offered several very specific tactics including learning to saying “no,” doing one thing at a time as much as possible, taking regular breaks from technology and, no surprise, getting more sleep. It was this idea above all else that hit a collective nerve, especially as Tony continued to explain the significant toll sleep deprivation has on our health, mood, cognitive capacity and productivity.

“If you’ve gone more than four days with less than five hours of sleep–and most of you just indicated you have–you’ve come to work functionally intoxicated (i.e. legally drunk).”

Yikes.

He even goes so far as to say that sleep is more important than food and and cited Anders Ericcson’s famous study of violinists, which identified sleep as the second most important factor in improving skill, aside from practice.

Does anyone find this profound? A distinguishing factor between the top 25 violinists in the world and their peers was…sleep? And doesn’t this theoretically apply to…all of us, regardless of profession?

Tony says yes.

As for me? I’ve made a real effort to shut things down earlier. As for the iPhone? It hasn’t left the bedroom just yet.

You can view Tony’s full SXSW presentation here.

*The average American sleeps less than 6.5 hours/night.