A 90-minute nap

What the length is

This is the same unit the wake-time pages count in, used once instead of four or five times. Everything the rest of the site assumes about a cycle it assumes here too, which means the ninety is just as much a convention on this page as on any other, and just as adjustable.

Ninety minutes is also one of the five cycles in the seven and a half hours the week's tally uses when you set no target of your own. The tally counts nights, not naps, and that figure is a default rather than a recommendation.

Against the break rules

Ninety minutes asleep is an hour and three quarters lying down at the default drop-off. That is forty-five minutes past the hour-long meal interval South Africa's Basic Conditions of Employment Act gives most employees after more than five hours' continuous work. It is also half an hour past the seventy-five minutes after which the Act says the rest of the interval must be paid, unless the employee lives on the premises where they work. Against the United Kingdom's twenty-minute rest break it is more than five times as long. United States federal law requires no lunch or coffee break.

The other three

• 20 minutes
• 30 minutes
• 60 minutes

A whole night instead

Past about three hours a nap is a short night, and short nights are counted in cycles on the wake-time pages, one for every quarter hour of the day.