Sleep Time

Hamlet:

"To sleep, perchance to dream-ay, there's the rub."

Do you experience apathy? Is your speech slurred, and your memory impaired? Does multi-tasking hurt your brain?  If so, you may not be drunk...you might be sleepy. I probably won't get many arguments by stating that we should all get more rest.  Who doesn't like to catch up on sleep?  What puzzles me is the fervor in which some workers regularly schedule sleep out of their daily schedules...and it is making you CRAZY.  


So why are people doing this?  Studies have shown that the people who regularly suffer from sleep deprivation have the following 2 things in common:

• They have others to care for at home
• Their job prevents them from obtaining regular sleep

The American Psychological Association says:

"Having a 24/7 lifestyle can also interrupt regular sleep patterns: the global economy that includes round the clock industries working to beat the competition; widespread use of nonstop automated systems to communicate and an increase in shift work makes for sleeping at regular times difficult."

The human adult is optimized to stay awake for around 15 hours a day.  How many hours to do you devote to work a day including travel time to the office?  10, 12 hours?  How many hours does that leave in a day to take care of your home, self, family?  Not very much if you ask  me, and I don't even have kids!  

As an IT worker, it is common for me to work long, strange hours.  This has often caused sleep issues for me.  At one job in my past, at a major Fortune 50 company, I was required to wear and respond to a pager.  One night, that thing did not stop going off all night and I got no sleep at all.  I was still required to go in to work the next day and be on call the next night.  It was at that time in my evolution of an IT worker that I developed the ability to answer and delete pages in my sleep. No joke! I was so stressed and exhausted that I think my brain was going through some desperate motions to save myself.  My boss wasn't very happy, though.

I ended up quitting that job for a better one.  I made it a point to never allow myself to be treated like that again.  I chose to quit because the reason why I was asked to do so much work was due to the inability of management to adhere to an SDLC for its products that caused many bugs in released versions.  They just expected their techies to support, report, and provide ad hoc fixes for the crap they shoveled out.  Heck we were making these guys look like rock stars!  As long as the support staff continued to function under those conditions, we would be expected to keep it up.

Not getting enough sleep causes people to become depressed, too.  And guess what?  Depression and anxiety are another major reason for people not to get enough sleep.  Some people don't get enough sleep, but don't even realize it.  That's because sleep loss also causes poor decision-making, especially if the decision is between making money and sleeping.

So what's another way to tell if you aren't getting enough sleep?  One way is to try to remember what you dreamed about in the morning.  If you aren't dreaming and remembering at least one dream a week, I'll bet you aren't sleeping enough.  That is your body is trying to tell you something and if your priorities continue to be skewed in the wrong direction, your health will suffer and so will your productivity.  


After all, Hamlet wasn't really waxing poetic about getting sleep, he was thinking what it must be like to die. Get some sleep and don't make yourself crazy.  Most of us will appreciate it even if your boss needs a reality check. You only get one life to live.

Avoiding Work Creep - The Details

Those of you who have been reading my blog may have already read my entry on Work Creep.  Here, I continue the topic with some specific suggestions that have worked for me in cutting the creep out of my day.

1) IF YOU DO WORK on the weekend or late at night, let your boss know what you're working on and let those who asked you to do the work (even if it is your boss) know that you took your personal time to do the work and you didn't get to do something else instead.  For example, if you weren't able to attend your best friend's baby shower, let those folks know what you missed out on in order to help them.

2) PITCH ITERATIVE DELIVERABLES - the word iterative means to repeat and a deliverable is an end-product you provide to your customer.  This is the divide and conquer technique.  If you are a mechanic, you deliver repairs, if you are a hair-stylist, you deliver beauty treatments.  If you are an IT worker, you probably already know that your deliverables can be an email, a file, or a whole chain of tasks.  Why not bargain to break up what is due and when it is due for you?  You may be surprised by the results of this conversation if you just try it.

3) TAKE A NUMBER - Most workplaces have a way to number requests in the order they are received, or at least they have an appointment system.  If you have both where you work, make full use of them both.  Don't let people do "drive-by's" for immediate assistance.  I learned this by working with our Tech Support department at work.  IT tech support is usually organized in tiers 1,2,3... and so on.  When the guys on the first tier are unable to solve an issue on their own, they are NOT ALLOWED to walk over to their buddies in tier 2 for a life-line.  Why?  Because the company makes more money when they escalate to the higher tier.  Why would you let someone else do that to you without paying you more money?

4) REPORT YOUR TIME - Some people are surprised when they see the work they do in a statistical format.  For example the free application Manic Time runs in the background of your Windows session and keeps track of the applications, documents, and away time on  your laptop, if that's how you work.  Other applications like Harvest for the iPhone can be used by folks like home contractors to record their time on the job.

5) PAY UP - When I owned my own maid service in Dallas, TX, I was faced with a seemingly insurmountable problem.  I had to find a nice way to tell clients with seriously dirty places that I just didn't have the man power for their mess.  I asked my maternal grandmother what she did as a seamstress the past 30 years when she faced a customer in her small-town shop that she just didn't want to help.  Think about it...if my grandma was rude to a customer, the whole town would know about it in a day or two.  She said simply price your service out of their reach.  If it is at all possible for you to increase your bill rate some how, then do so.

6) CURRENT RESPONSE TIME IS - It helps to give your customers as much information as possible, even if it is bad information.  The reason why is that folks get frustrated when they are left baffled because they are unable to make a decision about what to do with their time.  Your customers may also have others' deadlines waiting on their success.  If anything, if your response time is a week or more, it tells others that you are genuinely busy and they will have to wait.

Avoiding Work Creep - The Basics

Those of you who have been reading my blog may have already read my entry on Creeps at Work, but this entry is about the opposite...when work creeps into your private time.  It's a growing problem these days, no matter what field you work in.  Managers are trying to do more with less, and the more blood (work) they can squeeze out of the turnip (you), then the more they will keep squeezing.  Rest assured there is no shortage of work to go around these days.

I made up the term "Work Creep" after becoming familiar with a Software Development Life Cycle term called Scope Creep.  For those of you who do not know, scope changes can make a software design project larger or smaller.  Scope changes can affect the timeline of the project and the cost of the project.  These changes in scope are more commonly referred by the term scope creep.  In the same way, work creep can be thought of as something similar.  Work creep can make your workload smaller or larger, without any increase in pay or decrease in days off from work. Work creep can affect the timeline of your own personal life as in, your bed time, meal times, but in the end, it affects how much work you are responsible for at your office at the end of the day.

As babies, we cry when we don't get our basic needs: sleep, food, potty and shelter.  As humans, we don't outgrow these needs.  We have an instinct to cry for these things as a child because not to do so would put us at an evolutionary disadvantage to survive.  As adults, you still need the same things, but I wouldn't try crying about it.  Instead I have a few other suggestions.

After spending nearly 10 years at one job, I've learned to practice a number of tactics to keep the work from infiltrating my personal time without being looked upon as a "passer of the buck".  Often my tactics work.  I'd like to share with you what I've learned.

1) Practice saying, "No," BUT always spin your decision to avoid work after hours in a way that benefits the company.  Nobody needs to know your personal business, but I’d be willing to bet if you dig in to what’s being asked of you, you’ll find out someone else forgot to do something in time. For example, your boss asks you to work after-hours to complete a report at the last minute.  Perhaps you could find out exactly what information she needs from the report and provide that component during business hours, then complete the rest of the report the next day?  I think you’ll be surprised how willing people will be to work with you if you just find out what they really need.

2) Don't make yourself easily available for work after hours.  Think about the guy on Office Space who tries to sneak out of the office on Friday afternoon.  I mean, you probably don't want to make it THAT obvious, but DO make it more work for someone to ASK you to do extra work than it takes to actually get the work done.  If you have a calendar that others can view your Free/Busy data from, then require folks to schedule time with you.  If they ask why, just remind them that that is the best way to make sure you can address their concern.

4) SET BOUNDARIES - this goes for personal as well as work life.  If you don't know what your boundary issues are, you should really stop and think about how much personal processing space and down time you need to take care of your life and those you love and NOT the other way around.  Don't regularly agree to do work inside your boundary space.  Others are going to take the lead from what you say YES to.  If  you find yourself saying, “No, it’s OK,” a lot then that’s a red flag that it is probably not.