How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life pdfdrive com

Prioritize it.
It doesn’t matter how well you think you’re getting by—you’d
be sharper if you weren’t short of sleep. So if you’re working late and not
sure whether to push on: go to bed. You’ll be faster and smarter in the
morning—more in control of the facts, and more able to see new linkages.
Make it darker.
Expose yourself to as little light as possible before bedtime.
Try not to use your phone as an alarm, to reduce the temptation to look at its
screen. If you like reading e-books, use a device that has diffuse light.
Develop a sleep routine.
It’s easier to fall asleep more quickly if you have a
routine, because your associative brain starts to associate the bedtime ritual
with “it’s time to sleep.” The ritual ideally includes going to bed at the same
time each night, with a fixed pattern of activity leading up to the moment
when you climb under the cover.
Finally, if it’s truly impossible for you to get all the sleep you need (thanks to
work schedules or family responsibilities), there’s encouraging evidence on the
usefulness of naps in improving the clarity of your thinking. NASA has
conducted multiple studies on the effects of what it calls “strategic naps,” one of
which found that a twenty-five-minute nap boosted performance by 34 percent
and alertness by 54 percent.
12
And naps of sixty to ninety minutes have been
found to be long enough to improve memory.
13
That’s why companies like Google, Huffington Post, Cisco, Nike, and Procter
& Gamble have set aside nap rooms for their employees. It’s still comparatively
rare to find workplaces that are well set up for naps, of course. But I often carry
earplugs and an eye mask with me, and have been known to rest my head on my
desk to grab a nap; I know other people who sit in their cars or book themselves
into small conference rooms to snooze, sometimes using special nap pillows

---

(yes, such things exist). According to an international survey by the National
Sleep Foundation, a third of us are regularly using naps to top up our sleep—and
our smarts.
14
That includes productivity expert David Allen, author of 
Getting
Things Done
, by the way. He told me that he aims for a nap of twenty-five to
forty-five minutes every afternoon, which he says is “much better than coffee.”
15