Sleep – a very productive night-shift!
Today I read a post from an intelligent, accomplished and resourceful person lamenting the fact that if she wanted to get another two hours work done a day she would not be able to continue getting out of bed at 7:30am. Let’s set aside the fact that half past seven in the morning is still the middle of the night for me (and what would that make rising two hours earlier?) and ask whether encroaching into sleep time in this manner is actually likely to increase overall, systemic productivity. “Not more on sleep, Damian!” you may be crying. “Yes, more!” I respond, as I believe it is that important.
I have discussed the crucial importance of sleep in a number of previous blogs (blog 1, blog 2, blog 3, blog 4) and have pointed out that sleep deprivation (and that is what we are talking about with modern working practices) is clearly shown to result in atrocious thinking, poor judgment and rotten decision-making. If you want sound performance from your people you should be creating circumstances and procedures where they are well rested and feel entitled to be well rested.
“So what?” some of you may be thinking, “This is a dog-eat-dog world and I would rather have people at their desk making some type of decision rather than lying in their beds not working at all.” I will allow the short-sightedness of that comment to pass and choose not to observe that every sub-standard decision made through sleep deprivation probably costs infinitely more time and effort to correct (how much time and money was spent cleaning up the Exxon Valdez disaster in contrast to what it would have cost to get the Captain an extra few hours quality sleep – same for the Challenger disaster, same for Chernobyl, same for an infinite number of smaller every-day decisions) and I will merely take issue with the notion that when people sleep they “aren’t working.”
Whilst, to the outside observer, sleeping people may not seem to be doing much, EEGs and other results of sleep research show that a vast amount of activity is going on in the human mind during sleep. We travel through a number of different phases of sleep which include cycling several times through the Rapid Eye Movement (REM) stage. REM is hugely important in consolidating and integrating new learning. Studies have looked at what happens when volunteers were taught a new skill and then experienced sleep disruption of various types. Those volunteers who had their sleep disrupted during REM sleep periods integrated the new skill much less successfully than those who had their non-REM sleep interrupted. Quality sleep, covering all sleep phases, is essential for effective learning and integration of new skills and knowledge.
In a subsequent blog I will look at why there is even greater sense than might have been imagined in the folk wisdom of ‘sleeping on a problem.’ Concepts such as these are covered on our Working Patterns for Maximum Efficiency course taught in London, Cheshire and Belfast.
Tags: high-performance, Performance Enhancement, performance management, sleep
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