March 11--I would like to state for the record that I am a strong proponent of naps.
In fact, to demonstrate my devotion to short periods of daytime sleep, I took three naps while writing that first sentence. (In my defense, I had to look up the word "proponent" and decide whether to write out "I am" or use a contraction. It's exhausting work, really.)
While napping at work has been frowned upon through most of America's history, it's gaining favor as workplaces become more aware of the benefits that come from sleep.
Consider the title of a new report by the consulting firm McKinsey Company: "The organizational cost of insufficient sleep." (The fact that I'm highlighting this on daylight saving time weekend, when we lose an hour of sweet, precious snooze time, is what we in the journalism biz call "a sweet hook.")
From the report: "Many companies do not do enough to promote healthy sleep, which can have serious consequences. As we will demonstrate, sleep deficiencies impair the performance of corporate executives, notably by undermining important forms of leadership behavior, and can thereby hurt financial performance."
The firm conducted a survey of business leaders and found:
--43 percent say they don't get enough sleep at least four nights a week.
--almost half (47 percent) said their companies expect them to be too responsive to emails and phone calls.
--66 percent said they were dissatisfied with how much sleep they get.
--36 percent said their companies don't allow them to make sleep a priority.
