Sleep isn’t a pause from getting better. It’s when your brain files everything you learned today.

What you learn in a day is not fully yours until you have slept on it. The sorting happens overnight, quietly, without any effort from you, which makes it easy to treat as dead time and the first thing to sacrifice when the week is full. Cutting it removes part of the learning you stayed up to do.

When you are tempted to trade sleep for one more hour of work, look at what that hour is actually worth. Often the better version is to stop, sleep, and start fresh on a brain that has filed the day.