Are Your Long and Late Hours Actually Making you Less Effective?
I know we’ve talked about this before, but I found this recent research from Boston University that lays out what may be one of the best reasons why the constant late-night grinds of some jobs are actually hurting not just the employees who are grinding away at those hours but might also be getting you much worse work from them.
New Study: Sleep Is Literally a Deep Clean for Your Brain
Sleep washes away toxic gunk that builds up in your brain. Do you really want to leave it there?
If you read the article you’ll get some of the interesting details of the study, and the implications for the results, but what I want to know is this.
Are those long hours you expect from young lawyers, doctors, Wall Street financiers, traders, etc. actually contributing to cognitive decline? In essence, are you working them into being less intelligent than when you hired them? That seems like a really poor plan.
Look at it this way, if you’re a client of one of these companies, who do you want doing your work, the associate who hasn’t slept more than 4 hours a night in weeks, or someone who’s actually rested? Who is going to do a better job for you? Who is going to be most cognitively effective?
Why do we keep grinding away at the expense of our own cognitive abilities then?
