What’s the harm in walking into work Monday morning a little groggy?
As it turns out, quite a bit.
According to one estimate, the economic cost of sleep loss in the U.S. is more than $400 billion annually!
In his book, Why We Sleep, author Dr. Matthew Walker makes it clear that getting enough sleep is vitally important to our productivity at work.
Studies have repeatedly shown that insufficient sleep systematically dismantles our ability to generate creative ideas and solve complex problems.
Unsurprisingly, our motivation and effort are similarly affected.
Give participants the ability to choose between work tasks of varying effort, from easy (e.g., listening to voice mails) to difficult (e.g., helping design a complex project that requires thoughtful problem solving and creative planning), and you find that those individuals who obtained less sleep in the preceding days are the same people who consistently select less challenging problems.
Matthew Walker
Put simply, if you want a surefire handicap when you walk into the office, then deprive yourself of eight hours of sleep.
But I get it. It’s not always easy to make sleep a priority. This is especially true during the busy seasons when work piles up.
We like to believe that there’s not enough time to sleep because we have too much work to do.
Here’s something to consider. Maybe the reason you have too much work to do is precisely because you didn’t get enough sleep in the first place.
The irony that employees miss is that when you are not getting enough sleep, you work less productively and thus need to work longer to accomplish a goal. This means you often must work longer and later into the evening, arrive home later, go to bed later, and need to wake up earlier, creating a negative feedback loop.
Matthew Walker
The lesson here is simple. It’s a fool’s bargain to shortchange your sleep.
Don’t be discouraged if you can’t break a bad sleeping habit all at once. Even a small change is better than none.
One extra hour of shuteye is often the difference between an employee who is creative, innovative, collaborative and productive and one who is not.
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