Humans seem to be naturally biphasic: modern hunter-gatherer tribes sleep for 7-8 hours at night, and then nap for 30-60 minutes in the afternoon.
I’m having fun imagining a workplace where this sort of pattern is encouraged. A large part of the difficulty would be dealing with self-destructive work cultures where nobody wants to violate a norm in a way that risks making them look lazy. I’d want to start by having the highest performers try napping after lunch, so that people come to associate it positively with productivity, frame napping as the opposite of lazy, like exercise, it’s not work but it’s something that hard workers do. But there’s a chance the higher-performers are exactly the people who wouldn’t benefit from napping- There is such a thing as a short-sleeping gene in humans and a lot of CEOs seem to have it- so starting with them might soil the whole thing.
I’m remembering hearing stories of a lot of workplaces getting nap pods and telling their employees that it is “okay” to nap. I don’t think this should be taken seriously. If you don’t have enough beds for everyone in the office to sleep, it wont become a norm. It certainly wont become a habit.
I’d want to experiment with assigning a sample of people (or a set of volunteers) to napping every day, that’s a design we could take seriously.
I’m having fun imagining a workplace where this sort of pattern is encouraged. A large part of the difficulty would be dealing with self-destructive work cultures where nobody wants to violate a norm in a way that risks making them look lazy. I’d want to start by having the highest performers try napping after lunch, so that people come to associate it positively with productivity, frame napping as the opposite of lazy, like exercise, it’s not work but it’s something that hard workers do. But there’s a chance the higher-performers are exactly the people who wouldn’t benefit from napping- There is such a thing as a short-sleeping gene in humans and a lot of CEOs seem to have it- so starting with them might soil the whole thing.
I’m remembering hearing stories of a lot of workplaces getting nap pods and telling their employees that it is “okay” to nap. I don’t think this should be taken seriously. If you don’t have enough beds for everyone in the office to sleep, it wont become a norm. It certainly wont become a habit.
I’d want to experiment with assigning a sample of people (or a set of volunteers) to napping every day, that’s a design we could take seriously.