I'm preparing for my third attempt at a polyphasic sleep schedule (second attempt at Everyman). The logs of the first two attempts can be found here and here. I'm taking a different approach than the last two times; I'm going to start by getting used to getting up at 7:00 every morning. I'll allow somewhere between two weeks to a month for that part. I know it might not seem like much to some people, but believe me, for me that's a challenge. I'm planning on following the advice in this article, where the basic idea is to have a consistent time that you wake up no matter what and you let your bedtime be the variable. This means you have to pay attention to when you get tired, because your body knows you're not going to compromise on the wake-up time, so it clues you in as to when you should go to sleep to get enough rest.

Once I've adjusted to the 7:00 wake up time, I'll add in the naps. I'm hoping this will be a smooth transition and that I'll naturally get tired later and later for core sleep once I add the naps in. A possible problem would be that I'd be getting plenty of sleep at night, so I wouldn't be tired enough to fall asleep for the naps...if that's the case, I could always add an “earliest bedtime” and a “latest bedtime” and slowly make those later to try to push my schedule towards the shorter core sleep + naps.

After I've played around with the different lengths of core sleep and adjusted to the three naps, I'll figure out where to go from there; a strict 3-hour core or some kind of range. I'll keep the 20-minute naps a set length, and I'll still be moving those around slightly (no more than an hour from their scheduled time) to fit my daily schedule.

Here's my goal schedule:
4:00-7:00 core sleep
13:00-13:20 nap
17:30-17:50 nap
22:30-22:50 nap

This morning was the first day waking up at 7:00. I went to sleep around 22:30 last night (so early for me!) I was just barely tired enough to fall asleep. I managed to wake up without too much complaint, though.