Sorry to say I don’t have any good answers about this. When midnight on-call calls became a fairly regular occurrence for me, I quit my job to go somewhere it wouldn’t be any significant issue.
But if it helps, I’ve always gone back to bed after a call and laid there trying to fall asleep until either I fell asleep and got a little bit of extra sleep or my alarm went off and I had to work. I always felt like crap when I did, but I doubt I’d have felt any less bad had I stayed up instead. My theory was that even if staying up might be preferable at the time, going back to bed, even if I only got an hour of sleep, would be better for me (at least in terms of not shortening my lifespan as much) in the long run.
(Full disclosure, I’m a coder, not a sysadmin, but they were taking DevOps pretty seriously, so I was on call for the applications my team maintained.)
Mmm I guess it’s a give and take scenario with the lifespan analogy. I think I feel more useless to the business as I sit there feeling ever so much more tired throughout the workday and the struggle to focus increases throughout the day. Thanks for the input!
I didn’t intend for the “lifespan” bit to be an analogy. I meant that sleep deprivation will literally shorten one’s life. Especially if it’s a frequent occurrence. When it comes to things like 3:00am calls, I’ll prioritize my health over my usefulness to the business any day.