Sleeping on the Job?

Do any of you sleep on the job? Do you wish you could? With a six-month-old baby at home neither my wife nor I are always getting a full night’s rest. Sometimes I’m so sleepy at work I think if I could just close my eyes and snooze for 20 minutes it would really help. I have an office with big glass windows, facing both inside the building and outside. I have seriously contemplated putting up window coverings of some sort and bringing in a sleeping bag and pillow. I could nap during lunch? Would 20 or 30 minutes do more harm than good? What do you think?

Here’s a Newsweek article on this subject:

Asleep on the Job: Sleeping pods at the Empire State Building in New York

Says Newsweek: If Kristine Johnson gets fewer than seven hours of sleep at night, she barely makes it through the workday. So when that happens, Johnson, a 33-year-old San Francisco office manager, takes a nap. She’s slept in a lawn chair on the roof of her office, in a locked private bathroom (with just a pillow for support) and in her car. Johnson naps at work only twice a month, but it makes a noticeable difference, she says. “It makes me more alert and better able to do my job,” she says.

She’s in good company. In March, the National Sleep Foundation reported that 37 percent of Americans nap during the day. About a third of the people surveyed by the NSF said their workplace permitted naps, and more than a quarter said they would sleep at work if their employer let them. Work-time napping has seen enough of a popularity boost to fill its own business niche: Yelo, a New York City store that opened last year, has private rooms with sleep pods for quick naps ($15 for 20 minutes). Its founder, Nicolas Ronco, plans to expand to three New York City locations next year and then to other cities.

Naps do more than make up for lost sleep. They increase creativity, memory and alertness, says Sara Mednick, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego, and author of “Take a Nap! Change Your Life.” A recent six-year study of 23,500 healthy adults by the Harvard School of Public Health and the University of Athens Medical School showed that taking naps at least three days per week reduced coronary mortality by 37 percent.

So… what do you think? Is it time for a power nap?