Want To Improve Productivity – Try Napping

One productivity hack is now much easier to use because we are all working from home.

This tool is free, does not involve any training, and can be used by everyone.

This hack will help you restore alertness, enhance performance, and reduce mistakes and accidents.

What is this hack?

Taking a power nap.

Before we talk about power napping, we have to address one of the biggest productivity killers in business today – the lack of sleep that employees are getting.

In the recent Harvard Business Review article "Sleep Well, Lead Better," they paint a very dismal picture:

According to the most recent data from the National Health Interview Survey, the proportion of Americans getting no more than six hours a night (the minimum for a good night's rest for most people) rose from 22% in 1985 to 29% in 2012.

An international study conducted in 2017 by the Center for Creative Leadership found that among leaders, the problem is even worse: 42% get six or fewer hours of shut-eye a night.

Why is sleep such a big deal? It is because:

… it allows us to consolidate and store memories, process emotional experiences, replenish glucose (the molecule that fuels the brain), and clear out beta-amyloid (the waste product that builds up in Alzheimer's patients and disrupts cognitive activity).

By contrast, insufficient sleep and fatigue lead to poor judgment, lack of self-control, and impaired creativity. Moreover, there are lesser-known secondary effects in organizations.

My research shows that sleep deprivation doesn't just hurt individual performance: When managers lose sleep, their employees' experiences and output are diminished too.

Why is it that even though research shows that sleep deprivation leads to decreased performance, we all still disregard it? The simple answer is that we have unfortunately given sleep deprivation a heroic status in business.

• We all marvel at the person who can do it all with only three to four hours of sleep.
• We lionize the teams and individuals who do an all-nighter to get a project done.
• We think that we need to respond to our boss's pre-dawn email to show that we are a 24/7 team player.

This behavior all leads to a sleep-deprived team that will not perform at its best.

The easy answer is not to have everyone get the recommended seven to eight hours of sleep needed to be at their best. You cannot control the personal lives of your employees.

What can be done is to consider allowing and condoning power napping at work.

Before I get to the benefits of a power nap, I will need to address how napping is looked down upon here in the USA. Many consider napping as being loafing, wasting time, showing weakness, and being just plain weird.

Years ago, when I was an Assistant Product Manager (APM) at Borden, my VP of Marketing asked me to talk with one of the other APM's about her napping in her office during lunch. The VP thought it was weird and unprofessional and wanted it to stop (lucky me for having to be the one to talk with her). Fortunately, I was able to let my peer know about our VP's issue without too much embarrassment.

I also remember reading about the PR dustup that happened when Brian Halligan, the CEO of HubSpot, created when he talked about napping during a New York Times article about the culture of HubSpot and their upcoming IPO. All of the critical things that Halligan discussed were buried under the lead that Brian Halligan loves napping (there are now 23,100 Google search results for Brian Halligan and Napping).

Why is napping a good thing? The HBR article mentioned above says that napping can:

• speed up cognitive processing
• decrease errors
• increase stamina for sustained attention to difficult tasks later in the day.

Need some more proof? Here is an Inc.com article (Why Power Napping Can Improve Your Productivity--and 4 Ways to Do It Right) lists out the benefits of the power nap:

Power naps do more than help us catch up on sleep after a night of tossing and turning. They've also been shown to improve cognitive performance in the following ways:

• Facilitate creative problem solving and logical reasoning.
• Boosting learning capacity.
• Enhancing the ability to remember information.
• Improving mood and reduce stress (which impairs cognitive performance when left unchecked).
• Decreasing the risk of making errors on the job.
• Increasing mental alertness and reduce fatigue.

Wait – there's more.

Here is the science behind the 20-minute power nap (Source: Science Says Napping Increases Productivity):

The 20-minute nap, also known as the Power Nap, is one of the best ways to get an extra burst of energy and make it through the rest of the afternoon.

It enables you to get the most out of your short nap without worrying about being groggy or needing extra caffeine to wake up.

The Mythbusters proved the efficacy of the power nap during a 24-hour test on a boat — taking four 20-minute naps every six hours during a 24-hour period helped to make them more efficient and accurate during their tests.

As the benefits of power napping become more accepted, we will see that this will become more mainstream regarding accepted workplace behavior.

We may not be at the tipping point just yet. 

In the recent SHRM magazine, they provided the following statics from Amerisleep that says that 70% of people in technology admit to "snoozing during working hours." The nature of this question (are people admitting to something that they should not be doing?) shows that napping is still not yet an accepted workplace behavior.

Some companies have designated napping areas (and even sleep pods). Let's hope that this trend will migrate to the mainstream. A well-rested and restored workforce can be an organization's most powerful productivity gain.

It has never been easier to take a power nap now that we are all working from home. There are no co-workers around to tease you, and you have full control of your space. I have developed a routine where I wake very early (4:00 AM) and get a couple of hours of work done. I then take a thirty to sixty-minute snooze. I am then ready, refreshed, and prepared to take on the world.

Let me know if you have taken advantage of power napping now that we are almost all working from home.

About the Author:

Patrick Lynch is the Vice President of Global Operations at Careerminds, a provider of affordable, outplacement 2.0 solutions for organizations that are downsizing. Outplacement 2.0 is the convergence of career consulting, e-learning, and online social collaboration to connect unemployed individuals to a new opportunity more efficiently.

Patrick is also the proud President-Elect of SHRM-Atlanta, the premier HR association in Atlanta. SHRM-Atlanta dedicates itself to growing the skills and knowledge of HR professionals, developing business leadership competencies in our members, and leading the development of best in class workforce and workplaces in the Greater Atlanta area.