Don’t sleep on working smarter

[Amy]

We’ve all heard the phrase “early to bed, early to rise”, and it just doesn’t work for everyone anymore. Even if your commute is now from one side of your house to the other, and you get some of that time back, I think we can all appreciate that sleep is still one of the most important things in life. Mike Sholars took a deep dive into what sleep looks like now over on the Work In Progress blog, but here’s some of the things that we thought are interesting for our Community members, especially when it comes to working from home. 

In his book, Why We Sleep, Dr. Matthew Walker says that across the population, 40% of us are genetically hard-wired to be morning people, 30% are night owls, and the rest fall somewhere in the middle. That means that at any given time, one third of your team may be working at a time that doesn’t suit them - they could be sleep deprived and groggy to begin with, or getting sleepy before the end of the work day. Sleep deprivation affects your mood, productivity, and ability to think creatively. So if you’re a night owl working normal business hours, there’s a good chance you’re not showing your best work or your best self to your team every day. 

The core of distributed work is about using modern tools and attitudes to remove as many barriers between people and productivity as possible. It’s a way of thinking that requires trust and autonomy for everyone involved. Reimagining how and why we keep the hours we do is the next logical step.

If a team can organize themselves to work when they’re at their best, fully rested and wide awake, then it shouldn’t matter that all of those hours are at exactly the same time. Using tools like Dropbox Spaces and Paper means that your team can stay in the loop on tasks, to-dos, and progress. People can log on at a time when they’re feeling refreshed and no time is wasted, instead of logging on at 8am and struggling through until 11am which could be wasted time. We have some tips on getting started with Spaces here, and some Paper tips and tricks here. 

Dropbox Spaces

There have been a lot of changes to how we work, and overall, they seem to be resulting in more focused work for some people. If we can change where and how we work, then why can’t we change when we work?

Does your team all work the same hours, or do you work asynchronously?