The cost of speed
Studies done on overworked and sleep-deprived doctors showed they had the alertness of people legally drunk. You might think working long hours makes you a hero, but how would you like to be operated on by an exhausted doctor? In 1999, The Institute of Medicine reported 98,000 deaths due to medical errors.
Daniel Dement, sleep researcher and founder of the Stanford University Sleep Research Center and author of the national best seller, "The Promise of Sleep," shows how sleep debt lowers IQ, has long-term health risks and is responsible for 33 percent of traffic-fatigue-related accidents.
Sleeping on the job
Arshad Chowdhury, co-founder of MetroNaps, said fewer people are getting enough sleep. Many are only sleeping four to six hours a night. His company makes the EnergyPod, a space-aged looking chair designed for employee napping. He got the idea when still working in the investment banking industry where he noticed exhausted employees falling asleep at their desks.
When I asked Chowdhury about the difficulty of getting people to slow down enough to nap at work, he said it was a matter of culture. Employees at Procter & Gamble Services in Germany are enthusiastically embracing power napping. The company is pleased with improvements in employee energy and well-being. Miami airport installed EnergyPods so harried travelers can recharge and renew. And mini-hotel rooms are now catching on in major airports around the world, so the previously rushed can be the newly relaxed.
According to Chowdhury, the EnergyPod is more popular with West Coast companies. It may be a matter of openness to new ideas, but there is also a raft of scientific evidence as to the benefits of napping, and the stupefying -- in some cases lethal -- effects of sleep deprivation.
Hospitals and airlines are now leading the way by introducing mandatory napping programs. Clearly some businesses understand the value of coping with speed and benefits of a well-rested workforce.
The effect of speed on creativity
We're conditioned to go fast. In school, children are taught to come up with the right answer fast. There's little time for discovery and developing a more leisurely and creative approach. Children are expected to know "how" but not necessarily "why." The rush is on to get through the material. I have a friend who teaches MBA courses at a prestigious university. He laments the students' desire only for tools. They have no time to be curious: to play with ideas and to find out why.
According to an article in a recent Economist ("The race is not always to the richest," December 8 – 14, 2007), educational performance of U.S. children is poor by world standards. Our reading performance doesn't even make it into the top 12 OECD countries. And only Mexico is behind us on math performance. Finland is number one in science education. What's the Finnish secret? The schools hire well qualified teachers -- and here is the counter-intuitive part -- they slow down and spend plenty of time with the students.
Sir Ken Robinson, author, creativity expert and educational guru, says that our education system is still a nineteenth century model. Then, the workforce wasn't expected to be smart. It was expected to be efficient and obey. And the only options were to "do more, faster." In the early twentieth century, workers were subjected to time and motion studies. Every movement was timed. Soon this sort of dehumanizing work was taken over by technology. But our education system is still playing catch up.