They employed 452 adults for a one-month data-entry job, which the authors say it's "a relatively cognitively-demanding task intended to be sensitive to sleep deprivation."
They employed 452 adults for a one-month data-entry job, which the authors say it's "a relatively cognitively-demanding task intended to be sensitive to sleep deprivation."
As a side note, the study also says that short afternoon naps increased productivity.
I'm...extremely skeptical a generic "data entry job" is "high cognitive demand".
Same here. While writing the GP comment, I considered using that exact example as something that I wouldn't expect to be heavily impacted by moderate sleep deprivation.
> The six-hour subjects fared no better — steadily declining over the two weeks — on a test of working memory in which they had to remember numbers and symbols and substitute one for the other. The same was true for an addition-subtraction task that measures speed and accuracy. All told, by the end of two weeks, the six-hour sleepers were as impaired as those who, in another Dinges study, had been sleep-deprived for 24 hours straight — the cognitive equivalent of being legally drunk.
> People like this put themselves, their teams, their companies, and the general public in serious jeopardy, says Dr. Charles A. Czeisler, the Baldino Professor of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School.1 To him, encouraging a culture of sleepless machismo is worse than nonsensical; it is downright dangerous, and the antithesis of intelligent management. He notes that while corporations have all kinds of policies designed to prevent employee endangerment—rules against workplace smoking, drinking, drugs, sexual harassment, and so on—they sometimes push employees to the brink of self-destruction. Being “on” pretty much around the clock induces a level of impairment every bit as risky as intoxication.
The majority of people can't run on 6 hours of sleep. It is the luck of genetics to be able to do that on a regular basis and pretending it is anything else is silly. I can point to numerous articles like these with similar results.
> Usually their productivity dropped due to being sleep deprived
High levels of sleep deprivation is only common for the first few months.
> not having the time on nights and weekends to come up to speed on any new technology.
This tends to be a problem on teams that don’t properly evaluate costs of new technology and so churn like crazy for very minor productivity increases.
Are the companies really getting much out of driving employees like this? I’ve had myself a few hours with sleep deprivation and it doesn’t take long before my productivity significantly collapsed and my thought streams are borderline delusional and erratic.
I bet a lot of them are unemployed. This survey should really be correlated with how many hours a day the person in question works. It's very likely those who can afford to sleep longer have to work less.
I wonder if they could work in a napping system that compensates for the lost sleep. Several 45 minutes naps can do a lot if they are working 30 hours straight.
...so of course a lot of tech companies absolutely wreck their employees' sleep habits with crunch times, oncall requirements, notifications around the clock, etc.
This seems counter-productive. Humans with sleep deprivation are prone to mistakes (as the author admits).
I know "we do what our bosses tell us"- but honestly if it was me I would be informing my boss that this is counter-productive and will cost the company (or in this case the country and it's countrymen). Much better to have staggered shifts or even a small night crew.
The problem with this is that everyone is on the regular sleep 8 hours per-night schedule and you wouldn't be able to do this if you were working a regular job.
Exhaustion and inexperience according to the article. You try navigating safely on 3 hours of sleep over the past three days doing a job you weren't trained for.
this was my first thought. coming from a country that provides this, and having laws that don't allow you to work more than 48 hours a week (with overtime) helps a lot to make sure that people get enough sleep.
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