When people don't sleep enough, it's as if they were drunk. That's one of the key insights that I took out from reading the book Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams (1).

When Mark Bertolini was the CEO of the health insurance company Aetna he decided to pay employees 25$ a night if they get enough sleep. That's 7 or more hours of sleep for 20 nights in a row. So your boss is giving you 500$ for sleeping well.

This is one of those crazy ideas I love. When people sleep enough they make better decisions (2). But I also think, that when people sleep enough, they stop to behave like machines. They realize they have natural needs. And if you realize that you might be also a bit more inclined to realize that the world needs a bit more rest and a more natural rythm.

Action question

How can you promote within your organization or team actions that are more natural and more slow?

Footnotes

• (1) You can find my notes and favorite quotes about the book here if you're curious.

• (1) Lack of sleep really leads to shitty decisions. In the book "The Organized Mind" there was this crazy quote:

  « Sleep deprivation was ruled to be a contributing factor in some of the most well-known global disasters: the nuclear power plant disasters at Chernobyl (Ukraine), Three Mile Island (Pennsylvania), Davis-Besse (Ohio), and Rancho Seco (California); the oil spill from the Exxon Valdez; the grounding of the cruise ship Star Princess; and the fatal decision to launch the Challenger space shuttle. »

Daniele's notes

• This is the first shitty draft of this principle

• This principle might one day make it in the fifth book in the "Service Design Principles" series that explores how to better serve humans and the planet.

• If you're curious about service design principles, you can get the four previous books in the series, with proofread principles and less grammatical creativity.