Asking your employees to waste time in commuting, and then promoting a nap "to improve productivity"? Looks shortsighted to me.
Why Companies Should Insist that Employees Take Naps
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Re: Why Companies Should Insist that Employees Take Naps
#72My dad is a TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) doctor. He told me that every hour slept before 12AM count as 2 times as effective. I tried it out for a few month going to sleep around 8/9pm. I usually find myself waking up around 1am. super alert and energized for several hours where I will do a lot productive writing and creating till 5/6am. Then I'll sleep for 1 more hour. And for the rest of the day I'm totally energized with no afternoon dip. I do think our current sleeping patterns is a bit limiting.
Here is a TED talk that touch upon the subject as well:
Re: Why Companies Should Insist that Employees Take Naps
#73I'm confused how this was submitted because I submitted the exact same article five days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1714358 Regardless, I think space would be the biggest issue. I don't think most companies could afford to have sleeping pods like Google.
really? I mean, maybe not one for every person, but eh, one for ever five or ten should be quite doable (and I bet you don't have that many simultaneous naps.) I mean, even the prgmr.com office has a cot, and you don't get much more poor than us.
Re: Why Companies Should Insist that Employees Take Naps
#74Unfortunately for me, if I fall asleep in the middle of the day, I am going to sleep for 2-3 hours, sometimes longer. Sleeping for less than that is pointless; it can sometimes take me at least 15-20 minutes to get to sleep. And, I'm not sleep-deprived; I get plenty of rest these days, having already burned my body out on all-nighters coding in elementary, middle and high school. I can't do it anymore.
The refreshing effect even from a very short period of sleep (think nodding off at a lecture) can be surprisingly strong. Try going for a nap and setting an alarm clock to go off after 20 minutes, without any expectation to necessarily fall asleep in the time. I often find that 20 minute daytime naps help a lot even if it seems to take more than 10 minutes for me to start nodding off.
Re: Why Companies Should Insist that Employees Take Naps
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't get me wrong - I'd love an excuse for a nap! But its guaranteed to burn the hours involved, for a marginal increase in productivity.
Heaven forbid people be more productive when they could be clocking exactly eight hours like good little automatons.
Read the article again - suggesting its those 8-hour companies that should institute naps.
Re: Why Companies Should Insist that Employees Take Naps
#76A friend and I have this running agreement that if we ever do a startup together, we will force all employees to take a nap after lunch. As a college student, I understand how useful naps are. Students live in short bursts of concentration during the day (e.g. when in class), and that 30 minute nap between classes is a life saver. Heck, a lot of our conversations involve talking about naps in its intricate details. L…
"30 minute nap between classes" -- heh, that's not how I remember it :) I had one class right after lunch, on Special Relativity. I was interested in the subject (it was an elective), but the lecturer's voice was quite monotonous and I rarely stayed awake through the whole class...
In my case, it was Introduction to Computer Science - I slept through the entire class and still aced it, having been introduced to computer science in puberty - but it was right after lunch with the worst lecturer in the department.
They were sweet naps, though.
Re: Why Companies Should Insist that Employees Take Naps
#77In "The Promise of Sleep", the author talks about naps and getting tired in the afternoon, and his conclusion is that the only reason people get tired in the afternoon (which is when your clock-dependent alerting is at its lowest) is because they are sleep deprived. If you are well rested and don't have sleep debt, you should not get tired at that time. Having consciously tried to get enough sleep over the past 2 yea…
Well even if that's true (n=2 isn't a sample), it doesn't affect the article's claims. The pilots mentioned performed better than the baseline.
Nothing I said implied that the pilots shouldn't perform better than the baseline, unless pilots are a group in society that uniquely carry less sleep debt than average.
Re: Why Companies Should Insist that Employees Take Naps
#78In "The Promise of Sleep", the author talks about naps and getting tired in the afternoon, and his conclusion is that the only reason people get tired in the afternoon (which is when your clock-dependent alerting is at its lowest) is because they are sleep deprived. If you are well rested and don't have sleep debt, you should not get tired at that time. Having consciously tried to get enough sleep over the past 2 yea…
In "SYNC: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order" the author (Strogatz) talks about how in a cave environment, people still take naps a little after noon. People are just as likely to be asleep at 2pm as they are at 4am. Car accidents peak around that time. People fall asleep when their basal temperature is at their lowest, and yup, guess what, people experience a body temperature dip in the late afternoon. Basica…
Again, Dement doesn't argue against this. There is a tendency to get tired in the afternoon, because clock-dependent alerting (which give us our diurnal sleep schedule) dips at that time. But he's arguing that the reason this is affecting people so strongly is because basically everyone is chronically sleep deprived.
Re: Why Companies Should Insist that Employees Take Naps
#79In "The Promise of Sleep", the author talks about naps and getting tired in the afternoon, and his conclusion is that the only reason people get tired in the afternoon (which is when your clock-dependent alerting is at its lowest) is because they are sleep deprived. If you are well rested and don't have sleep debt, you should not get tired at that time. Having consciously tried to get enough sleep over the past 2 yea…
I think lunch can also be to blame for afternoon fatigue, depending on what you eat.
He specifically says that's not the case.