I'm finally picking up on a message my body keeps telling me, every time I stay up all night to work on a project or do some other activity. That message is simply: "Stop doing this stuff. You're only going to kill yourself."

Back when I was a teen, pulling all-nighters to fool around, or prepare for a test, or to just hack and play on the internet, was natural, and I had no problems recovering afterward. But now, every time I stay up through the night to work on something, the recovery is difficult. I might go down for a nap in the morning, and wake up to find that it's 8pm at night, rather than noon.

And the work I did overnight doesn't increase my productivity. Even if I make it through the day after an all-nighter, I'll be less productive at best, and usually not productive at all. I don't often have a loss of productivity, but it does happen.

The lesson here is that pulling all-nighters to get more done often results in not getting any more work done than just doing it during the day, and will have deleterious effects on the body and mind. I doubt that I'll stop doing all-nighters altogether, but I do need to make more of an effort to cull the number of nights I spend up on the computer, working on stuff and fooling online.

My health and productivity depend on it.