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Home » Diets that Work » Why Skimping On Sleep And Working Overtime Is Killing Your Productivity

Arianna Huffington talks often about
how the key to her productivity is
sleep.

It's a smart suggestion, not least because so many of us still
imagine that the more we work, the more productive we are. For
over a hundred years or more, this has been deemed nonsense.

The first productivity studies were conducted by Ernst Abbe at
the Zeiss lens laboratories in the 1880s. They indicated what
every other productivity study has shown since: that, up to
around 40 hours a week, we're all pretty productive but, after
that, we become less able to deliver reliable, cost-effective
work. Why? Because when we get tired, we make mistakes—and the
extra hours we put in are absorbed by correcting our errors.
This is demonstrably true in industries like software coding,
in which mistakes can cost a lot of time to put right. But it
is equally true in manufacturing where more units of production
also mean more flaws and waste.

Even though the data around productivity has proved pretty
remorseless, humans have found the message hard to accept. It
seems so logical that two units of work will produce twice the
output. Logical but wrong. The critical measure of work isn't
and never should be input but output. What matters isn't how
many hours your team puts in, but the quality and quantity of
work they produce.

Which is where sleep comes in. Although we might all like to
imagine that we can work happily through the night, once again
the data's all against us. Lose just one night's sleep and your
cognitive capacity is roughly the same as being over the
alcohol limit. Yet we regularly hail as heroes the executives
who take the red eye, jump into a rental car, and zoom down the
highway to the next meeting. Would we, I wonder, be so
impressed if they arrived drunk?

The reason sleep is so important is because fatigue isn't
simple. When we are tired, our performance doesn't degrade
equally. Instead, when you lose a night's sleep, the parietal
and occipital lobes in your brain become less active. The
parietal lobe integrates information from the senses and is
involved in our knowledge of numbers and manipulation of
objects. The occipital lobe is involved in visual processing.
So the parts of our mind responsible for understanding the
world and the data around us start to slow down. This is
because the brain is prioritizing the thalamus—the part of your
brain responsible for keeping you awake. In evolutionary terms,
this makes sense. If you're driven to find food, you need to
stay awake and search, not compare recipes.

After 24 hours of sleep deprivation, there is an overall
reduction of six percent in glucose reaching the brain. (That's
why you crave donuts and candy.) But the loss isn't shared
equally; the parietal lobe and the prefrontal cortex lose 12
percent to 14 percent of their glucose. And those are the areas
we most need for thinking: for distinguishing between ideas,
for social control, and to be able to tell the difference
between good and bad.

I've sat in many boardrooms through the night, at the end of
which seriously bad deals were done, I've seen the cost of
sleep deprivation. Not just in bad tempers, bad diets, and bad
decisions. But in the loss of truly productive work and
discussion that could have been less heroic but a lot more
valuable.

This
post originally appeared at Inc.

See the article here:
Why Skimping On Sleep And Working Overtime Is Killing Your Productivity

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Home » Diets that Work » Why Skimping On Sleep And Working Overtime Is Killing Your Productivity