(Working at Home)/25″/dt1st/mark2nd
ALICE BREDIN
Afternoon naps are one of the great pleasures of working at home. They are also a seasoned work-at-homer’s secret to productivity. As many people who work at home know, even a 20-minute rest can leave you feeling rested and energized for the rest of the day.
However, guilt often gets in the way of naps. A man I know who works at home and loves to take naps has given up on them altogether because he now has employees. He thinks it will look bad to employees if he goes upstairs in mid-afternoon to rest while everyone else is working. The consequence is that he is exhausted and his work is suffering.
He is not alone. According to the National Institutes of Health Sleep Center, the typical American is sleep deprived. A 1997 research study concluded that the average person needs 8.1 hours of sleep each night but gets only about 6.9.
A recent National Sleep Foundation Gallup survey revealed that nearly half of all U.S. adults acknowledge that daytime sleepiness interferes with their routine daily activities. And many sleep experts agree that a majority of adults no longer know what it feels like to be fully alert.
While it is normal to feel a mid-afternoon slump, feeling very sleepy in the mid-afternoon isn’t normal. Here are some symptoms of too-little sleep that you may not have recognized:
? You rarely wake up in the morning without the alarm clock.
? Upon awakening, you don’t look forward to the day ahead.
? Getting out of bed is a painful chore.
? You drop things, bump into furniture and are generally more clumsy than you used to be.
? Your eyes feel tired and look puffy well into the late morning.
? You feel a little sick until you’ve been up for a few minutes.
? You frequently fall asleep when reading.
? You don’t really feel like talking to other people in the morning (and you used to enjoy it).
? You often nod off in gatherings or at events that you’d prefer to be alert for.
? You make more mistakes ? large and small ? than is normal for you.
If many of these statements ring true for you most of the time, you should attempt to increase the amount of sleep you get. If you resist napping because you think it is lazy, consider this list of famous nappers: Winston Churchill slept for one hour after lunch each day; John D. Rockefeller slept for 30 minutes each day at noon; and Eleanor Roosevelt closed her eyes or napped for 20 minutes before important presentations whenever possible.
If telling employees you are taking a nap makes you feel uncomfortable, tell them you are going upstairs to read for a while or look over reports. Here is some other napping advice:
? Pick the right time. Ideally, take your nap between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. These are the times when our diurnal rhythm tends to make us most sleepy. In other cultures they call this siesta time. Also, if you nap much later in the day, you may interfere with nighttime sleep.
? Keep it short. Nap no longer than 40 minutes. This will keep you from losing sleep at night and also from getting into such a deep sleep that you wake up groggy.
? If you can’t bring yourself to grab 20 minutes from the afternoon, you might want to try catnaps. They aren’t for everyone, but some people can go off by themselves where no phones will ring and close their eyes for just five minutes or so. They get up feeling remarkably refreshed and rested.
Curing spring fever
Now that spring is here and the weather is improving in many parts of the country, the potential for distraction is high. Most of the work-at-home people I spoke to this week said they have been dawdling in the morning, either sitting on the porch or in their yards enjoying the weather.
It makes a lot of sense to take advantage of working at home by spending some time outside when the weather is great. If you rush to your desk every day in the same way you would if you worked in a traditional office, you are missing one of the benefits of working at home.
But if you are in crunch mode and need to stay focused, you can employ some tactics to avoid distractions even if you have spring fever.
The best thing you can do to get motivated is to set goals. As evidence of the power of goal-setting, consider this: In 1953, Yale’s graduating class was asked if it had set written goals and developed an action plan for achieving them. Only 3 percent said they had. When researchers reinterviewed the class 20 years later, it turned out that the 3 percent who had set written goals were worth more financially than the other 97 percent combined.
Set goals for the year and then break them down into monthly, weekly and daily goals. Spend some time each week reviewing your goals and take a couple of minutes each day to plan out what you want to accomplish.
If you have goals and are still struggling to jump-start yourself each morning, try beginning your work day with the task you enjoy most. Luring yourself into the work day with fun tasks may help get you to your desk.
It can also help to create a routine. The best routine will depend on your style. Here are a few examples of routines people have adopted:
? Schedule an early-morning phone meeting, either with a client or colleague. Once you are at your desk, your momentum will build on itself. If you find yourself having difficulty returning to work after lunch, do the same for the afternoon.
? Set strict starting times for your day and regard those times as a inflexible.
? Establish a clear boundary or ritual that marks the beginning of work every day. For some people, it is the moment the family walks out the door; others use the end of a favorite news program as a cue.
? The next time you start the day with verve and stick to your schedule, take note of what was different about your routine.
? Get in the habit of letting unfinished personal projects wait until you have accomplished some work in your home office.
? Make a to-do list in the evening and use it to keep focused on work the next day.
Alice Bredin is author of the “Virtual Office Survival Handbook” (John Wiley & Sons) and a nationally syndicated columnist.
