Sleeping with your Smartphone: How to Break the 24/7 Habit and Change the Way You Work [Hardcover]

The author is missing the point, the title is misleading. If you are looking to shift priorities and excel at work while still having happy, uninterrupted personal time on a daily basis, this book will not help you. This book is about giving people one 'night' (as in, you worked that day, but truly 'clock out' at 6pm) off per week, and it's something that must be done at the team or organizational level. One night per week is not enough for a real personal life, and, most workers who are sleeping with their smartphones don't have control of their team and/or organization. If you are an executive looking for a way to help your team to stop sleeping with their smart phones one day per week, this might be moderately useful for you. I found it to be highly disappointing and wish I could return a kindle book :(

Leslie A Perlow, of the Harvard Business Review, recently published Sleeping with Your Smartphone: How to Break the 24/7 Habit and Change the Way You Work. The book details the experimental implementation of a predictable time-off policy within the Boston Consulting Group to have just one night off a week. Through the process, Perlow and her team learned that the time off resulted in more than just a night of rest, but also enabled the consultants from BCG to feel better about work and the clients to be happier with the work provided. How is it possible that working less time yielded better results?
If anything, BCG has one of the worst reputations for work-life balance. Consultants often travel four days a week and are glued to their smartphones. Emails are exchanged at all hours of the night and on weekends. So even when consultants aren't at work, they're still responsive to work issues. Perlow calls this the Cycle of Responsiveness. People feel pressured to be available for work, coworkers notice the availability and contact them, schedules adjust to allow for the responsiveness and the cycle continues until it creates a culture.
The experiment was simple. Each consultant on a team would take one night off each week. Just one night of not answering emails until midnight, not working on PowerPoint slides in the hotel room and not sitting in the client's conference room until 8pm. Perlow's thesis was that change needed to be implemented as a team to address the cultural roots of the Cycle of Responsiveness.
The experiment almost immediately ran into trouble. Consultants didn't want to appear lazy or entitled in front of their coworkers, so they'd skip the night off, but then resent anyone who didn't do the same. So, to keep the experiment running, Perlow resurrected an old BCG practice, the Pulse Check. In a weekly meeting, team members would discuss how they felt about the progress and process of their work.
When people started opening up with meaningful dialog about the process, the time off became a shared goal that they could all work toward. They started developing systems to work better, cover for each other and share project information. The tacit goal was to enable each person to take a few hours off one night a week, but the overall effects were far more profound.
Since each person knew more about the process, they were able to anticipate each other's needs better. Because there was overlap in responsibility, the client felt more well served. And because the meaningful dialog allowed everyone to voice issues, the BCG consultants felt better about their job and their future with the firm.
Perlow writes well and uses the story of BCG to tease out the principles in the book. It's filled with quotes, stories and statistics culled from three years of experimenting with BCG teams around the world. Reading the book feels like taking a tour of the firm, the characters are warm and engaging (though they're often anonymous for the sake of confidentiality).
The book begins to lose steam toward the end. The introduction promised broad-ranging application, but Perlow kept returning to the stories of BCG, which start to feel worn out by the last chapter. Other than a lack of specific application outside the hyper-intense culture of BCG, the book Sleeping with Your Smartphone provides excellent, proven principles for how to bring change into an existing corporate culture and how to empower employees to join in the fight to make the company better.

Ignore the title of this book. It serves only the publisher's marketing purposes. Focus instead on the subtitle: "How to Break the 24/7 Habit and Change the Way You Work." As is also true of most other business books, the subtitle is informative. It reveals why Leslie Perlow wrote the book. Clearly, she agrees with Charles Duhigg's observation in his book, The Power of Habit: ""We now know why habits emerge, how they change, and the science behind their mechanics. We know how to break them into parts and rebuild them to our specifications. We know how to make people eat less, exercise more, work more efficiently, and live healthier lives. Transforming a habit isn't necessarily easy or quick. It isn't always simple. But it is possible. And now we know why."

In Perlow's book, the smartphone is not the problem nor is [begin italics] how [end italics] the smartphone is used. Its use (actually abuse) is a symptom of the root problem: A mindset that ignores or under-appreciates the nature and extent of what can be controlled in terms of, for example, setting priorities, allocating resources, managing time, and renewing energy. Duhigg asserts - and I agree -- that we must create a better habit for changing habits just as Clay Christensen urges us to think more innovatively about innovation and Jon Katzenberg urges us to change how we think about change.

What Perlow offers in this book is a non-nonsense, practical, results-driven process by which to turn off electronically, while improving the work that is done. She calls the process PTO "because - at the core, when people work together to create `predictable time off' [PTO], people, teams, and ultimately the organization all stand to benefit" as do, I presume to add, an organization's past, current, and prospective customers. Also, establishing and then sustaining a PTO culture will make the organization significantly more attractive to the people it hopes to obtain in what is indeed a "war for talent."

The specifics of the PTO process are best revealed in context, within the narrative, with a real-world frame-of-reference that Perlow so carefully establishes for them. However, I do want to cite a few of the dozens of passages that caught my eye:

o "The [Initial] Transformation" (Pages 31-33)
o "Two Teams: A Study in Contrasts (54-58)
o "The Cycle of Transparency" (67-68)
o "The Benefits of Openness" (75-77)
o "Eliminating Bad Intensity" (95-96)
o "The Perils of Resistant Leaders" (117120)
o "Getting Started: Guidelines for Team Members" (156-158)
o "Diffusing Throughout our Organization (177-178)
o "Going Forward with Facilitation" and "Practices of effective Facilitation" (194-196)
o "Toward a More Humane Workplace" (204-205)

No brief commentary such as this could possibly do full justice to the scope and depth of the information, insights, and wisdom that Leslie Perlow shares in this volume. That said, I hasten to suggest that it would be a fool's errand for a reader to attempt to apply everything learned from the material provided. My suggestion is to re-read the book slowly and carefully (especially Chapters 10-12, Part IV), underlining the key passages you may have missed the first time, then draw up a list of 2-5 strategic objectives (no fewer than three, no more than five) that the PTO process can help your organization to achieve. Next, review the material in the book that is most relevant to what specifically must be done to achieve the objectives. Game on!